I was today years old when I learned that the UVA School of Medicine has a Division of Perceptual Studies, and that among the things this Division of Perceptual Studies does is, spend time and valuable research money putting together an analysis of 1,678 cases of purported reincarnation.
This is a real thing being studied at a major research university in the Year of Our Lord 2026.
I used that phraseology with intentionality.
As I’ll do with this observation: holy crap!
Sorry.
It’s my nature to be skeptical.
See, in my past life, I was way too trusting, and that proved to be my downfall.
There I go again.
Being sarcastic.
***
A release from UVA Health about this study stressed that it had “revealed a striking correlation” – that “the time between death and ‘rebirth’ was shorter on average when records indicated that the prior person had died unexpectedly.”
One other “striking” note about this study: “the correlation was strongest among families that did not believe in reincarnation, defying researchers’ expectations.”
“There had been an earlier published report suggesting a relationship between violent death and a shorter time between death and birth,” said lead author Saeedeh Sadeghi, Ph.D., from this Division of Perceptual Studies.
“We wanted to test that relationship more systematically and see whether it could be explained by cultural or psychological influences. To our surprise, the relationship was still there when we tested it in a much larger number of cases, and the social and psychological factors we examined did not explain it away.”
The researchers reviewed, per the release, “1,678 of the strongest reincarnation reports the Division of Perceptual Studies has collected over the decades,” meaning, there were reincarnation reports left on the cutting-room floor.
Damn shame.
The scientists found that the median intermission between death and purported rebirth was 16 months.
Which is another way of saying, Uncle Skeeter, who claims to have been Abraham Lincoln in a past life, well, you could always tell that he’s a lying sonofa …
“This is the largest systematic study to date of temporal patterns in reported past-life memories. Individual cases can leave room for different interpretations, but patterns across many cases are much harder to explain as exaggeration, fantasy or fabrication,” Sadeghi said.
***
Is this for real?
I mean, if the date on this release was April 1, I’d know what’s up, but, no, this isn’t fake news.
As opposed to me being a d—head about it, the researchers did plenty of due diligence, to the point that they say they’ve been able to rule out sources of potential bias “such as the possibility of ‘memory contamination’ – that children were repeating stories they had heard elsewhere – or that families within religions that embrace reincarnation could be using the possibility of rebirth as a coping mechanism for grief after the loss of a loved one.”
The mounting evidence, they write, per the release, “suggests that the intermission pattern may reflect a systematic phenomenon not readily accounted for by existing psychosocial frameworks.’”
To be clear, the research team is not saying reincarnation is real; “but further study, they argue, is warranted,” the release tells us.
“We hope this work encourages researchers to look beyond individual cases and ask whether there are broader patterns that can be tested systematically,” said UVA’s Marieta Pehlivanova, PhD. “The mechanisms underlying these findings are currently unclear, but that gives us even more reason to keep looking, not to look away.”
Maybe Uncle Skeeter really was Abraham Lincoln in a past life.
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Chris Graham
