Beneath the glass of a wood-framed display case in an off-campus library sit photos of numerous people with birthmarks, blemishes and defects.
The photos are former research subjects from decades of research conducted by Dr. Ian Stevenson, the founding director of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS, which was established in 1967.
For more than 50 years, the small division has been exploring the nature of consciousness. DOPS researchers study topics ranging from the possibility of telepathy to reincarnation within UVA School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences.
Stevenson died in 2007 after traveling the world investigating cases of people – often children – who reported remembering past lives.
The photos in the DOPS library highlight a common pattern seen in what Stevenson deemed “Cases of the Reincarnation Type,” of which DOPS maintains a more than 2200 case strong database that’s regularly updated and pruned.
“About 70% have unnatural deaths,” said Elliott Gish, a current research specialist with DOPS. “(They) could be violent, could be an accident. About 30% of these cases have some kind of birthmark or birth defect associated with that past life.”
Dr. Jim Tucker leads DOPS now and is fundraising to conduct a broad study into how common it is for children in the U.S. to report memories of past lives.
While DOPS also studies things like near-death experiences and people who report receiving communication from beyond the grave, the division is contacted by more than 100 families every year with children who say they remember past lives, past families – and sometimes, their violent demise as well.
“So far, it’s just parents finding us, contacting us, oftentimes concerned or puzzled as to what is going on,” said Marieta Pehlivanova, a psychiatric researcher at the division.
Many people, especially in the world of scientific research, regard the possibility of reincarnation as fanciful at best. DOPS researcher Philip Cozzolino, though, said the experiences are very real for the children reporting these memories and their families hearing them describe their deaths.
“Not real in the context of ‘is it a past life memory,’ but real as it’s happening” that many children report such memories, according to Cozzolino.
The shared phenomena by thousands of families has led researchers at DOPS to spend their lives studying the big question of what is actually going on with these children, and why, with no financial support from the university.
Pehlivanova said there’s also a mental health benefit to their investigations.
“It’s important to normalize them in the sense that even if we don’t yet understand what’s going on, it’s still something that happens to regular people of every demographic,” she said.
Pehlivanova said many parents keep their children’s stories private out of fear of the stigma that comes with them, and because they simply do not know how to talk about them. The families that DOPS interviews are often relieved just to learn they are not the only ones with their experience.
Researchers run DOPS cases through a rigorous investigation before adding them to the database, which has more than 2,200 entries. More than 200 variables are considered when looking into a case, according to Cozzolino.
“We believe these parents when they tell us their child is saying these things, we ask as many questions as we can,” he said. “We are always looking to refute as much, if not more, than we are looking to verify.”
A striking result from the decades of research is the number of cases that have been connected to actual events or people from the past – what researchers call “solved” cases. The number sits around 70%.
Pehlivanova expects recent cases are “solved” at a higher rate as researchers have become more selective in their investigations due to limited resources.
“In the last, I would say five years, Dr. Tucker has only been able to investigate fully a couple cases a year,” Pehlivanova said. “And they were all cases where, even before he interviewed the child, he had an idea of who the previous personality might be.”
Researching cases has become easier with the advent of the internet, though a significant portion of the DOPS database was explored years before the web was widely available to the general public.
Cozzolino, though, tempered people from reaching too far beyond what the data tells them, including whether the reported memories are memories at all.
“We have to always kind of remind ourselves … let’s stipulate we’re going to say past life memories, with the understanding at this point that there are other explanations for this,” he said.
Researchers at DOPS have plans to use neuroimaging techniques to better understand whether there are notable differences in children that report these memories compared to those who do not. A first step, though, is understanding how prevalent the phenomenon is in the general public.
“This will also put this phenomenon on a map in a different way than what we’ve done historically,” Pehlivanova said. “Most of the publications have been basically placed in these narrow parapsychology journals that are mostly read by people in our field.”
Cozzolino likes to think back to DOPS founder Dr. Ian Stevenson’s commentary that “to accomplish anything worthwhile in science and in nearly everything else, one has first to persuade oneself that things may be different from what they seem.”
“We are open to all possibilities,” Cozzolino said. “We understand that it’s easy to just say ‘Oh, I know the answer to that,’ or ‘You are foolish for looking for an answer to that.’ That’s just not the way science is – that’s not the way a scientist should be thinking.”
Pehlivanova added whether the evidence points to reincarnation, or something else entirely, what matters is understanding the truth.
