Scientific Evidence of Past Lives, The Patterns in Famous Past Life Cases & How You Live Now Affects Your Afterlife with Dr. Jim Tucker
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My jaw is still on the floor because you're now talking about people who are no longer living, who are somehow transmitting information or having their entire consciousness placed in another body. We've studied over 2,000 cases of young children who say they remember a past life. If you look at the cases,

There is a consciousness realm that interacts with the physical reality, but is also apart from it. There are times when the consciousness comes back to this same reality in a young child. I can't. I'm freaking-- I got chills up the back of my neck already. If you get data that conflicts with what you think you know of how the world works, well, then you have to question what you think.

I have become quite convinced that there's more than just the physical world, that there is this element or realm of consciousness, first of all, and that we all have a piece of it. This is an enormous statement. So the notion is... As you may have heard a few weeks back, we won two Webby Awards and a Gracie Award, and we wanted to say thank you. We could not be prouder. Thank you to everyone in our community who's been with us along the way and has supported our podcast and...

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Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. We've talked about a lot of these paradigm shifting concepts that we're going to discuss today, but we have never discussed them with someone who is a psychiatrist, the head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. He has spent his entire career as a clinical psychiatrist examining the possibility of

that when we die, our consciousness lives on. That's right, folks. We are talking today about a practical understanding of life after death. This is not floofy-woofy. This is not I had a dream. This is what does it look like to do a systematic analysis of reports that are outside of our understanding of the experience of dying.

We're going to be speaking to Dr. Jim Tucker. He is a child psychiatrist. And for the past 25 years, he has dedicated his career both to a clinical practice and he was the Bonner Lowry Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia.

He's the director of the Division of Perceptual Studies. It's an extensive, legitimate research group that explores the mind's relationship to the body and specifically the possibility that consciousness somehow survives after death. This is one of the most respected perspectives

Thank you.

What evidence can provide for us in terms of our understanding of what could fundamentally be the breaking down of our understanding of the material world and what happens when we die? Beautifully explained. He describes an example, many examples that he's studied where children remember past lives and claim to be people.

From the past with significant evidence that he says cannot be explained. And one of the most fascinating things about what him and his team do and have done for the past 25 years is they have examined over 2000 of these cases to try and figure out what is possible.

that would explain this away, and what is statistically significantly impossible to explain many aspects of these experiences. So he is the first one to say not every experience can be explained this way, not every piece of evidence lines up, but for the ones that do, it is undeniable that something is going on here that is beyond our current understanding, and he's going to break down the science around that.

We're so excited to welcome Dr. Jim B. Tucker to The Breakdown. Break it down. Dr. Tucker, welcome to The Breakdown. Thank you. Thanks very much for having me. So you come to us by way of Scott Barry Kaufman, who we had on our podcast, and then I sort of started doing a deep dive into all the people that he has had on his podcast. And you were one of the people that he sat in conversation with, and I said to Jonathan...

We have to talk to Jim Tucker. So thank you for being here. A little bit about sort of what Jonathan and I do here is we talk a lot about the intersection of science and spirituality. And we are very interested in phenomenal things. But we're

We're also interested in the practical understanding of phenomenal things. You study something that is absolutely impossible for us to wrap our minds around with any linear materialistic view of the world. Can you explain to people what you have dedicated your academic and clinical career to?

Right. So as far as clinical career, I just did routine child psychiatry for decades. But on the research side, the academic side, I trained at UVA, but then I was in private practice. But I came back to UVA to continue the work.

by Eden Stevenson, who was originally the chair of the Department of Psychiatry and then had established his research division. And his particular interest was young children from all over the world who report that they remember a past life. You've already lost a lot of people just by saying that. So talk a little bit more about what Dr. Stevenson did and what you've continued.

Yeah, so this is what we think is a serious-minded look at this phenomenon to see, okay, what is happening here, and is there evidence of

survival after death. Is there evidence that these kids are actually remembering a past life? And again, it's not from a religious bent or anything like that. It's more of being as sort of objective as we can about it. So we've studied over 2,000 cases, and you can find them essentially wherever you look, of young children who say they remember a past life. The question that we have is,

Are the details that they're giving, do they actually match somebody who did live in the past? And there are a number of cases where we can't determine that. So it really does not provide any evidence of continuation. But then there are the ones where we can. So, I mean, my jaw, like, I know what you do. I've read about you. I've listened to your, you know, other interviews you've done.

My jaw is still on the floor because this is something that, you know, purports to sort of bend our very basic concept that when we die, we die.

And even if you are willing to entertain something like the spirit goes on, people remember you, maybe you even have a religious concept, you know, of some sort of existence.

You're now talking about people who are no longer living, who are somehow transmitting information or having not just their identity, but kind of their entire consciousness placed in another body that then has consciousness enough to present that to a psychiatrist. That sounds odd to you. So...

Right. Now, I will say it doesn't come across to the kids as transmitting information, that a deceased person is transmitting information to them. From their experiences, very much things that actually they did, things that happened to them when they were living before. Yeah. I mean, if you're purely taking a materialist view of reality, then these cases make no sense.

So then you're kind of stuck dealing with, okay, well, what do I do with this evidence? And what many people do is simply dismiss it. But that's not what we have chosen to do. And frankly, that doesn't seem very scientific, right? I mean, if you get data that conflicts with what you think you know of how the world works, well, then you have to question what you think, whether you need to make adjustments.

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I would say my spiritual sense was sort of quiescent as an adult. I had gone to church so forth growing up. As an adult, I was, I would say, open-minded, really. So I didn't reject the idea of consciousness or spirituality. But at the same time, I was just sort of in the background.

And then when my wife and I got together, she was much more open to such things and opened me up in many, many ways, but including really examining, is there more to reality than just what we see here in our day-to-day lives? And in particular, this question of consciousness and surviving after death. So when we saw that...

Ian Stevenson's research group was starting a new study, Ashland Near Death Experiences, at my last suggestion. I called them up to see if they needed help interviewing patients. Again, not because I was convinced one way or the other, but because I wanted to sort out for myself, is something going on here?

So I did a little work on near-death experiences, but then as Ian Stevenson entered his 80s and did not have anyone to carry on the work at the university, that was sort of a slot for me. So then I, initially I was just volunteering an hour or two, but eventually I shut down my private practice and

or left my private practice and joined the UVA faculty, again, being a child psychiatrist, but also continuing to explore, again, for myself, is there something here? So I can't claim that I necessarily had great motivations to help the world, but more of sorting out for myself whether there is good reason to think that we may continue on after death.

And, you know, if people when people heard the work and sometimes hope that I think it does help them. But but it's also continues to be an intellectual exercise for me of trying to sort this out.

Because I like movies and I used to write them, I like to go into like the moment where the character sort of has this realization. Was there a moment where you were like living your life and kind of curious but not overly religious or spiritual and this idea introduced itself to you? Like was there that moment where there was sort of a push or pull which you then obviously pursued and became more curious about?

No, I mean, I think it was more of a gradual process, again, with my wife. Now, as far as a single moment that convinced me, okay, this is worth something, that something is going on here, there's a well-known American case, James Leininger, who is thought to be a World War II pilot, returned, and with that one, he

Yeah, we hear about a lot of cases and sometimes they sound really intriguing, but then when you get into the details, you see kind of the weaknesses of the case or things that don't quite fit. The more I explored that one, actually, the stronger it got because I realized we had a lot of documentation of what he had said before anyone had any idea if there was such a pilot that he was describing. Can you describe the case for people who may not be familiar? Yeah, of course.

So James Langer was a little boy who was the son of a Christian couple in Louisiana who, when he was around the time of his second birthday, started having horrific nightmares multiple times a week in which he would be kicking his legs up in the air and screaming, airplane crash on fire, little man can't get out.

And then during the day, he would take his little toy airplanes and repeatedly say airplane crashed on fire and bam, slam them into the family's coffee table. And I have a picture of it. There are dozens of scratches and dents from airplane crash on fire. He looked like a traumatized kid. Well, hold up. Hold on one second, though. But and I want you to sort of talk us through this. Many kids have nightmares.

Many kids will then recreate their nightmares in their play as a sort of way to try and figure it out. Many kids say many. I mean, my kids barely spoke it, too. So the whole thing is shocking that a two year old is having such, you know. But but what what is like what happens next when when this child presents with this? Well, right. If if it's just that, then we don't make anything of it.

What happened next was that his parents were able to talk to him about this material several times while he was awake. And what he said was that he had the Japanese that shot down his plane, that his plane was a Corsair, which I'd never heard of, but it's the type of plane developed during World War II, and that he flew off of a boat. And his parents asked him the name of the boat.

And he said Natoma, which seems like kind of a strange name for a U.S. aircraft carrier. But after that conversation, his father did an online search, and this was back in 2000. So it took him a while to find anything. But he eventually found information about the USS Natoma Bay, which in fact was stationed in the Pacific during World War II. Wow.

They would also ask him who he was, and he would just say me or James. And then one time they asked him who else was there, and he said Jack Larson. So this was all when he was two, and then when he was two and a half, his father had gotten a book on Iwo Jima to give to his own father, James's grandfather.

And James came and got in his lap as he was looking through it one day. And they came to a picture, an aerial view of Iwo Jima. And James pointed at it and said, that's where my airplane got shot down. I can't. I'm freaking out. I got chills up the back of my neck already. Well, so did his father. That his two-and-a-half-year-old was saying my airplane got shot down there. So...

Then it turned out that in fact the USS Tomitabe did take part in the Iwo Jima operation. So eventually with all this going on, his parents began to wonder, is this kid remembering a past life? Even though his father in particular was really opposed to the idea of past lives and reincarnation. But before James started saying these things, in fact, he started looking into it to prove to his wife that there's nothing to it.

But eventually became persuaded that there was. So when James was four, his dad went to a Natoma Bay reunion and he learned a couple of things. One, that there was, in fact, Jack Larson who had been on the ship.

So he went in, he had been looking for Jack Larsons among the war dead, but this Jack Larson had survived the war and was actually still alive. So he went and met him and learned that, in fact, he was on the ship during the time of the Iwo Jima operation. Because, of course, with these ships, there are groups rotating on and off. And then he had also learned that there was one and only one pilot from the Natoma Bay who was killed during the Iwo Jima operation.

This was a young man from Philadelphia named James Houston, which meant if James Lyon was recalling a past life, it had to be Houston's life. And what we see, one thing is James would always sign his pictures of planes and battle scenes, which he drew scores of, as James III, instead I'm the third James. Well, James Houston was...

James Jr., which would make James Lyon the third James. James said how he had been shot down by the Japanese, which Houston was. He said that he was flying a Corsair. Houston was actually flying a different plane when he was killed, but he was part of the squadron that tested the Corsair for the Navy.

James said that his plane got hit in the engine and then crashed in the water. And eyewitnesses reported that Houston's plane was hit dead on right in the motor. James had nightmares of where he crashed in the water and quickly sank, which is what Houston's plane did. James had said how Jack Larson was there, and Jack Larson was the name of the pilot next to Houston on the day that he was killed.

Not only is that a lot of details that have been verified, but they're very specific details, actual names. And all the things that I just told you are ones that we have records of that were made before Houston was identified, before anyone knew, anyone around James Linegar knew if there even was such a pilot. And this sort of aha moment for me, which I should have figured out earlier, was that

ABC News made this special about extraordinary events that actually never aired, but it included a segment on past life memories and had an interview with James's parents. This was before Houston was identified. And they also interviewed me for it, so they sent me a copy, even though it never aired. So it eventually dawned on me.

That's evidence of what James had said before Houston was identified, and it includes things like his mom saying that one day James said, "Mama, my plane was shot in the engine and crashed in the water, and that's how I died." And there was also talk of Iwo Jima and other things. So when I saw that all that was documented,

I still have not heard a decent explanation that explains away this case. There was a critic, a skeptic who wrote a 90-some page

article about it where he, he'd done a lot of work on it, but it's his piece didn't amount to anything. He still couldn't challenge the basics of this case, which is that James Leninger with no way of knowing about this one pilot of thousands or hundreds of thousands that were killed in the war, no way that he could have known the details about this guy. And yet everything that we have documented, uh, that James said, uh,

All those things were accurate for Jing Chi. All right. So I have a couple things that I want to sort of address. And I did not bring you here to prove that you're wrong. I don't want you to feel like I'm attacking you from that perspective. No, no, no. But that's not – there's a couple things that one has to set aside if you're going to have a reasonable kind of thought experiment about this.

The first is that some people would say, like, everyone's lying, meaning all the eyewitnesses who confirmed it, they it was misremembered. It was inappropriately cataloged, you know. So and I'm sure there there are statistical analyses you can do for the number of things that would have to be misreported in order to have a series of details of.

be not considered significant. But some people might say that. Some people might say, just because the eyewitness said that the plane was hit in the engine or the motor doesn't mean that it was. And this is where Jonathan and I kind of come up against some of the challenges that I and many have with the telepathy tape.

If you have someone say that something happened, that doesn't mean that it happened. It means that someone said that it happened. But your job in this kind of analysis is to try and understand it from all these different perspectives. So I'm going to set that aside. I'm going to set aside people who are just like, all the eyewitnesses are lying and it's just a bunch of hooey, blah, blah. So let's just set that aside.

Well, can I address that first? Oh, if you'd like. I mean, I don't give that, personally, I don't give that line of thinking much credence because I find it very unscientific. Meaning if you're presented with a certain amount of information that seems to be statistically significant, it is your responsibility to investigate it and not simply discard it. But I'm happy for you to speak to that as well if you'd like to. Right. So that's why documentation becomes so important.

And this was James's dad that did the vast bulk of this work.

There are military records that document Houston's crash. And yes, there is the one thing with the eyewitnesses, but most of it is, well, I mean, they were eyewitnesses back in 1942 or whenever it was, but it's not people making up stuff now to fit with what they find out happened to the pilot.

It's stuff that was documented decades ago. And we've also got documentation of James's father searching for things and like searching for Jack Larson and, you know, I mean, writing people trying to find out about this guy. So the paper trail for this one is quite impressive.

The next thing that I'd like to also set aside is the notion that, and again, I don't believe this, but his parents could be making all of this up. And I'm sure you've had to deal with this literally for decades. What if...

either the child had, I'm just going to make this up, the child had access to things that his father found interesting. And his father, in reality, loved to research things about World War II and had told this story. It somehow got into the child's head and the child has an exceptional mind, which indeed it would be an exceptional mind to hold all this kind of information. But the

We also have people who would say just because the father says or just because he documented this doesn't mean that he was not orchestrating this or that any of these parents were orchestrating it. So I'd like to bring that up and have you speak to that, because I think it is a legitimate concern that in many cases parents may even mindlessly or not necessarily consciously say,

Be inserting things or forgetting that they're inserting things in the case of facilitated communication and some of the conversations around the telepathy tapes, for example, parents, the whole point of making unconscious gestures or sounds is that you don't know you're making them. And if someone says we can detect that you're making.

unconscious to you, you know, but perceptible indications. I mean, it's the horse counting, right? The whole point of unconscious things is that they're not conscious to the person experiencing them. Can you speak a little bit to what might be happening with people who say like, the parents are just making this up? Like, how do you verify that they're not? Well, first of all, I mean, James Houston, again, was it was, it's not like there have been

things written about this guy. I mean, it's, but beyond that, when they did this ABC News interview, if they were going to orchestrate this whole thing, that was their golden opportunity to say, we've discovered that he was remembering this one pilot's life. But they didn't have that information then. So they didn't say that. So they gave the details that James was giving and

but they didn't know if it could be verified. And in fact, we've got email exchanges between James's dad and one of the producers saying, keep looking for this Jack Larson that sounds like a good lead and all these things that then ultimately proved to match for

Houston's life, but at the time were unknowns. So the so-called stranger cases where no one in the kid's life knew about this person, those are the ones that are the most impressive.

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I want you also to to kind of speak a little bit to the framework of why we can study, for example, case studies. And and your book from 2015 is in particular some very special studies or case studies. Jeffrey Kripal is a friend of the podcast and a friend of ours. And he's

When I read his book, which talks about thinking impossibly, it presents from, for lack of a better explanation, from the social science perspective and from the humanities perspective, the importance and the significance of valuing every single human's experience, even if it doesn't fit into a scientific paradigm, even if it doesn't fit into a materialistic paradigm,

What I'm interested in with you in particular is you've had this incredible career exploring from a completely scientific perspective, meaning from a materialist framework. You've been able to explore things that in many cases defy even the most basic tenets of what is required to examine something scientifically, meaning...

When we think of the scientific method, when we think of the reproducibility and the efficacy of being able to recreate things in a laboratory setting and remove things from their natural environment to recreate them in order to provide what many people say is proof, right? If this person's telepathic, I want you to prove it six ways to Sunday in every laboratory, remove them from everything that's comfortable to them, and you have to prove it. And that's the only way that we know that it's true.

But what Jeffrey Kreibel introduces, and I think what your work is elaborating on in an even, for me, more meaningful way, is a case study, even if it's one.

that has so many elements that are compelling and that require further investigation deserves to be treated as legitimate and investigated as such. Can you speak to some of the challenges of working with individual cases and what we are able to say or what we can extrapolate based on even one case study and why you believe that that's valid?

Well, first of all, this is not controlled laboratory science. And, you know, when you're studying spontaneous events, you have to accept that there can be limitations. So we are not

We've not been trying to prove anything. What we've been exploring is, is there evidence? So with science, typically, proof is not even the goal. And Ian Stevenson, I'm sure he's quoting other people, but he said proof should only be used in mathematics because, again, it's about accumulating evidence enough where eventually it gets accepted.

is different from any even controlled laboratory science. You're not proving anything. What you're showing is that it's beyond statistical significance, that there's something there. Now, as far as coming from a scientific point of view, I would challenge your idea that that means it has to be from a materialistic point of view. Again, when you're in the real world, not a perfectly controlled world,

Yes, there are some limitations that you have to accept. So you think, okay, well, one case doesn't prove much, doesn't provide much evidence. If the case is compelling enough, it does require an explanation. So with these cases, you add James Langer on to the other 2,200 cases we've investigated, and let's say they're not all as strong as his are.

But if you look at the cases, this work as a group, then I think the evidence does become impressive. And I mean, we can do statistics looking at various aspects of it. But as far as coming down to, okay, it was...

Is he reincarnated or not? As a whole, I think you can reasonably conclude, yeah, I think so. So because more preponderance of the evidence, perhaps instead of beyond the shadow of a doubt, but I think a good case can be made that preponderance of the evidence would lead you to conclude that some young children do have memories of a life in the past.

To me, this is the closest that many of us have come to having an actual understanding of consciousness existing outside of the current consciousness that we have perception of. What would it even mean to say that there is life after death? Well, what I think it means is that

There is a consciousness realm that interacts with the physical reality, but is also apart from it. So that when a person's physical body dies, the consciousness aspect might live on in a different way. Not to get into it too much, but I think a strong case can be made and has been made that

reality that consciousness is what is fundamental and that physical matter is actually derived from consciousness. But that ultimately reality at its core grows out of consciousness. This is an enormous statement. So the notion is, I'm just like, I want you to walk us through it. The notion is that

We have a consciousness and we identify as the person that's in this physical body. The only kind of way to understand these cases would be to say that there is some way that certain individuals, young children, are accessing someone else's consciousness from a different time.

On the face of it, the simplest explanation is that someone remembers a past life because they led the past life. But yes, there are certainly other possibilities to consider, even if you accept the cases. And, you know, if there is this realm of consciousness, I mean, it's almost certainly not linear. And, you know, so, I mean, we try to put everything in sort of a framework we can understand, but I suspect it's beyond that.

our understanding. You know, you could look at the idea, okay, rather than this person continue, this individual continuing on and then having a new life, like you're saying, is it that somehow the information continued but then wasn't alive, so to speak? So it didn't survive, but it kind of continued and then got picked up somehow by a young child.

You know, it's worth exploring the idea at least. And then there are also the idea of so-called Akashic records. I was, okay, you just pulled it out of my head because I was like, this exists, right? For thousands of years, people have talked about this. And there are many people who believe that they can dip into other realms of consciousness. And for the most part, they are right.

They're ridiculed, dismissed. You know, they have communities where they, you know, congregate together. But this is not something that we talk about. Right. And here we are talking about it.

Yeah, I mean, I bring it up as one example of things to consider. But yeah, the idea of the Akashic Records is that there's this infinite database of everything that's ever happened and everyone that's ever lived and so forth, and that people can pull up a file or a file opens up and then people can incorporate it and then either know about the past or believe they lived in the past.

Now, again, that concept, I'm not here to promote it by any means, but the idea that this realm of consciousness would include, again, material that's not necessarily surviving, but simply exists, is something worth thinking about. This is not one kid in the middle of Louisiana in recent decades.

For a tremendous amount of recorded history, this has been something that has been talked about, but you in particular are sort of privy to over 2,000 cases, and there's a sort of systematic process by which you kind of tackle these, right, and try and see is there something here. One of the things that keeps coming up, and I just can't,

I can't get my head around this. What is up with the birth marks and the birth defects? So Ian Stevenson was, before he got into all this and had quite a successful mainstream career, much of it was in psychosomatic medicine. So the interface between mind and body. So with these cases, he was really intrigued by them. And as for the kids, not only did they talk about past life memories,

but they were born with birthmarks or even full birth defects that match wounds, usually the fatal wounds, on the body of the previous person. I mean, I confess when I first got into this work, that seemed almost like a bridge too far for me. I mean, how would a wound on a body then show up in someone, even if they were reincarnated?

What I have come to conceptualize and what Ian conceptualized was that it's not so much the literal physical wound on the body, but more of how that affects the consciousness. So, for instance, if you're getting your fingers chopped off as you're being murdered, that affects the consciousness. And then in the case I'm talking about, then leads to similar effects.

impact on the developing fetus and leads to deformed fingers when the child is born. And, you know, there is

good evidence that at times mental images can produce very specific effects on the body. And we all know that stuff in the mind can have general effects on the body. So, you know, when you're nervous and your heart starts beating fast, I mean, you know, things, there's obviously a connection there, but at times it can be very specific. And the idea would be if you've got someone who is sensitive enough that they're

they carry that trauma with them or that image with them onto a developing fetus, which then makes it develop something similar. So, you know, there's sort of a logic to it. And certainly, I mean, Ian approached those cases with the same careful approach that he used with the other cases where when he learned about a case, he tried to find, first of all, get an autopsy report of the previous person.

And in the Asian cases, those were often not available. But then talking to as many witnesses as he could who saw the body to determine, does this kid's birthmark or birth defect actually match what the previous person? This part of the story would negate the idea that they're simply remembering or they're accessing an experience that wasn't their own. This would indicate that they actually did live through it.

I mean, it certainly gets harder to explain how a download of information would then produce a particular. Now, I'm not saying you couldn't twist it and make it squeeze it in there. But yes, I mean, that that that becomes less persuasive. Although just to steel man that argument.

If they did download it and they experienced it that viscerally and they, you know, read it and they have an active imagination, I'm just playing with what the consciousness could be doing, then potentially it forms. But it's a harder case to make. Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, you have to think, okay, if...

In the future, someone was able to take all of your memories and implant them in my mind. Did I experience them? Or is it just that it feels like I experienced them? I mean, I don't know. So, yes, I agree with exactly what you said. It becomes less plausible if you accept these birthmark cases, but not to say it's impossible.

Is anyone net new here or are we all just recycled consciousness? Because there are more and more people. So you would think that wherever consciousness comes from, there has to be people who have not had all these previous lives in order to justify all the population of the earth. Yes, many people have asked about that. So years ago now, a professor, Johns Hopkins, did the statistics on it. And in fact, so...

If you look at how many people have lived in the past, you have to make some estimates, obviously. There have been far more people who have lived in the past than are alive in the present. Now, the interval between lives would have to be growing smaller for us all to squeeze in. But it...

Some people have thought that population growth makes reincarnation impossible, and that's simply not true. On the other hand, I actually agree with you that who's to say there aren't new souls coming into existence? I mean, it may be that they are sort of eternal and suffer from space-time and have always been here and always will be, but we don't know that. And it may be new ones bubbling up all the time.

Or they come from some other system, enter our database. There may be multiple Akashic records. The Akashic records that are spoken about in our religious lineage may just be the library on the block. And there could be other blocks with other libraries and there could be book exchanges. We don't know. Yes. I mean, I actually think that, you know, if this is a reality that grew out of consciousness, why would there not be other realities that have grown out of consciousness?

So it may be, I actually personally, this is just a belief, but my personal belief is that reincarnation, if it occurs, it doesn't occur necessarily to everyone. That while I think there is reasonable evidence to say that a part of us can survive death, we may then have completely other experiences in other universes or other realities and not all come back here.

I think you estimated at about 70% of these cases. The people that they are

channeling, embodying, remembering, died from an unnatural cause and in many cases a traumatic one. And this is something that we talk about a lot and it did come up in our conversation about the telepathy tapes, which is not to say that nonverbal autistic children have trauma, but once you're dealing with a system that is operating differently, either because of, let's say, being a nonverbal autistic child

or having a traumatic experience, a near-death experience. It's possible that, and we talked about this with Scott Barry Kaufman, it is possible to imagine that there is some sort of differential susceptibility

to really being in touch with certain parts of ourselves and possibly other realms. So, you know, when I was in grad school for neuroscience, you know, there was discussion at that time of, you know, can we find God in the brain? You know, what does the brain look like of someone who is more likely to believe in God? Like, what is the thing that makes people want to believe, right? And this is a conversation we can have

you know, in a religious framework, but we can also have it in this kind of framework to say, if everyone's brain is different, you know, by and large, we're the same, but everybody's a little bit different. Is it possible that a situation where death involved some sort of trauma is more easily accessible to those who have

extra perceptual capabilities. So I've worked with many, many energy healers who can pick up on things indeed that seem to be from another realm, or they will know simply by looking at me from across the room where there is dis-ease in my body, right? This is something that energy workers tap into. They're trained to read energy.

different aspects of a person. Can you talk a little bit about this link between traumatic death and then also kind of a heightened perceptive ability that might be able to access that easier? Yes, you're right. 70% die by unnatural means, murder, suicide, combat, accident, things like that, which is way more than you would expect in the general population. And even the ones who die natural death

They tend to be young, so a quarter of them are under the age of 15. So it seems that sort of a life ending too early either increases the chances that a child will later talk about that life. Wow. And it may be that those kinds of factors lead the consciousness to sort of stay near this realm and then come back.

So, again, I mean, there are exceptions to everything. There are the natural deaths, but there may be particular factors that either lead intact memories to come through or lead the individual to come back to this life, you know, this world at all.

We're actually, our group is starting to try to look to ways to explore some of what you're mentioning. So we are going to look into certain testing. So for instance, people with PTSD, there's some tests where they show particular patterns or tendencies. Well, is this phenomenon like PTSD? Is it a post-traumatic kind of thing?

So the plan is to then do the same kind of testing with some of these people and see if they show the same tendencies as people with PTSD. Another kind of thing to look at, there are people who have incredible personal memories. So you may have heard about it, but you can say, what were you doing on March 4th, 1971, and they can tell you. So

Those people, if you look at testing how they perform, could you get similar results with these kids showing, okay, so maybe it's not a traumatic thing, but maybe it's just exceptional memory that even carries over into past life. So just trying to sort it all out.

Like my memory, my memory is so good. I don't I don't I can't only tell you what I had for breakfast or what I did last year, but I can remember the consciousness that I can access from seven generations ago. A really good memory. Right.

Right. Really good memory. We're going to pause here. There is so much more to this incredible conversation with Dr. Tucker and so many more fascinating revelations in part two. So please make sure you subscribe, stay tuned, and do not miss part two of our conversation with Dr. Jim Tucker from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two.

And now she's gonna break down, it's a breakdown, she's gonna break it down.