Where Is My Mind? - Ep. 7: Mediumship and Reincarnation

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

 "We’re looking at these cases of young children who report memories of a previous life." Featuring host Mark Gober’s interviews with Dr. Jim Tucker, Dr. Julie Beischel, Dr. Eben Alexander, Dr. Ed Kelly, Paul Davids, Dr. Jan Holden, Helané Wahbeh, Laura Powers, Laura Lynne Jackson, Dr. Jeff Kripal, Catherine Yunt. Listen to all of Mark’s interviews here: https://markgober.com/podcast/ Windbridge Research Center, peer-reviewed science on mediums: http://www.windbridge.org/education/peer-reviewed/ University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), examining children with past life memories and more: https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/ Check out Mark's book, "An End to Upside Down Thinking": https://www.amazon.com/End-Upside-Down-Thinking-Consciousness/dp/1947637851 To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the last two episodes, we have looked at near-death experiences and how our consciousness is somehow able to relive our entire lives through multiple perspectives, sometimes when our brain is off. So, by now you've heard me explain why I think the following things. One, the brain doesn't produce our consciousness. Two, our consciousness can exist beyond death. We've talked about people who have returned to their bodies in a near-death experience. In this episode, we're going a step further

and looking at whether consciousness exists after the body fully dies. Matt, I want you to think about something for a minute. Your body is functioning right now, as in you're alive, and your consciousness is functioning. Can confirm. But I alive, and your consciousness is functioning. Can't confirm. But I can't see your consciousness. I assume it's there because you're sitting across from me and having a conversation. Your consciousness is invisible. Right, but what do you mean by that? Here's my question. If we can't see a person's consciousness when they are alive,

how do we know their consciousness is gone when the body is dead? Why do we assume that what we can't see doesn't exist? For example, our eyes can only see certain types of light. We can't see x-rays or infrared light, for example. But we know they exist. So shouldn't we rethink our assumptions about consciousness? If our consciousness isn't confined to our bodies, why should it die when our body dies?

When the physical body dies, what you've done is stopped the restrictive mechanism of the physical brain, and your conscious awareness is set free. That was Dr. Eben Alexander, who we've heard from a number of times. In one sense, our consciousness is set free when we die. But what we're saying here is, it can still exist beyond death. Here's Dr. Ed Kelly, University of Virginia Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences. What we have is several kinds of research suggesting that something can continue beyond physical death. And in the best cases, that appears to be something very much like a conscious personality. Our conscious personality exists after the body dies. In this episode, we'll be discussing three big ideas.

One, when you die, your personality, your consciousness, your mind lives on. Two, people can possibly communicate with the dead via mediums or even spontaneous communication. Hold on, mediums? I thought we were only talking about real science on this show. We are talking about legit science. Don't worry. All right, I need to pull something up here. Give me a second. Meanwhile, our third big idea.

We're looking at these cases of young children who report memories of a past life. Hold on, what was that? That was Dr. Jim Tucker from the University of Virginia, arguably the world's leading expert on children who recall previous lives. Children recalling another life suggests consciousness can be transferred to another body. In other words, reincarnation or something like it. At least, that's what I get out of the research conducted at the University of Virginia

for over 50 years, including over 2,500 cases. You with me, Matt? I got to hear more about that. But you mentioned mediums. So this is what I was looking up. Have you ever seen John Oliver's HBO show last week tonight? Yes, Matt. I've seen John Oliver's show.

Come on, man. I don't know, man. You read a lot of books. Did you know that he did an entire segment on mediums and psychics this year? Let me play you some of the highlights. So tonight, let's take a look at the psychic industry, particularly one of the most insidious parts of it, mediums. People who claim to be able to communicate with the dead. Before we go any further, I am not going to be litigating whether psychics are real in this piece. For one, they're not. See? No litigation

required. Also, for anyone who does believe in psychic powers, I know there is nothing I could say that could convince you otherwise. Logic isn't the reason that you believe in them, and it won't be the reason that you stop. Okay, so, thoughts? My first reaction is John Oliver simply must not know about the extent of the research. He's not alone, but the evidence says he's wrong, and I can't wait to tell you why. Welcome back to Where Is My Mind. I'm Mark Gober. All right, Mark, I have a ton of questions already, but let's just start here. How are mediumship in this reincarnation business possible under your theory of consciousness? Back to Dr. Bernardo Kastrup's whirlpool analogy.

We're all whirlpools in a stream of water and the water is consciousness. What happens when a whirlpool dies? We talked about this in episodes five and six. The water flows back into the broader stream. It transitions into a new form. It's still water, it's just not what it used to be. So, when the body dies, consciousness simply transitions into a new state. After a whirlpool has been transformed to regular old water again, couldn't it form a new whirlpool in theory? The water is just recycled. So couldn't consciousness enter a new body, as in reincarnation? If you think about it, in our model of consciousness, these ideas make sense. If you agree telepathy is possible, you probably agree consciousness isn't stuck in our heads.

If you agree remote viewing is possible, like the CIA says, you're probably with me that consciousness might be beyond space and time. If you agree our consciousness exists outside our bodies during NDEs, then it could easily exist beyond death. So why should your consciousness completely disappear forever when your body dies? One piece of evidence that consciousness exists beyond death is that some people can communicate with the deceased person's consciousness, mediums. Now, many of us have preconceived notions about what mediums are,

including apparently John Oliver. But let's set the stage first. A medium is someone who is able to communicate with dead people. Many listeners are probably picturing something like a crystal ball or a magic trick, but lots of today's mediums are basically normal people. Mediumship has been around for a while. In the 19th century, Harvard psychologist William James studied a famous medium named Mrs. Leonora Piper and concluded she was able to get information she shouldn't have, and it baffled

him. In fact, she was taken from Boston, where she lived, to England to do readings where she knew no one. And detectives followed her around to make sure she wasn't researching people in advance of the readings. She still got results. But not all mediums have been studied so closely, and certainly not all are legit. Yeah, just a reminder, this is what most people today think about mediums. Because this surprisingly large, often predatory industry relies on popular culture to lend it credence and validity. To put it another way, every time a psychic makes a grieving widow cry on Dr. Oz, 10 con artists get their wings. Where is the downside in telling people their grandmother loved them?

But I would argue that at best, it is reckless for a stranger to take a stab at ventriloquizing the dead. There's perhaps no industry more tied to fraud and exploitation than the mediumship industry, if there even is such a thing. In fact, I'm a little surprised you're even willing to consider mediums, given your scientific approach to everything, Mark. One overarching point. There are frauds in every industry. Just because some mediums might be frauds doesn't mean all are frauds. Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme. Does that mean every single money manager

runs Ponzi schemes? Of course not. Having said that, to be clear, I am not saying every person claiming to be a medium is legitimate, not even close. What I'm saying is that the practice of mediumship is not only plausible in our framework, it's actually been scientifically tested. So I'm open to it. Okay, but John Oliver showed psychics saying someone had died, and the person they said had died was in the room talking. It's actually really funny to watch. Here's the thing. There is no rule stating that in order for a psychic to be legit, he or she has to be accurate 100% of the time.

I see the face you're making, Matt. I know it seems like a cop-out. Yeah, kind of. But we've seen this repeatedly on the show. Psychic abilities are often subtle. Remember the Gonsfeld telepathy experiment in episode 3? People were guessing correctly 32% instead of 25% of the time? And that was really, really significant from a statistical standpoint. people were guessing correctly 32% instead of 25% of the time. And that was really, really significant from a statistical standpoint. And yet the effect beyond chance was still there.

It's just subtle. Even LeBron James misses a few free throws once in a while. Sure, but saying someone's dead and then they're not, that's not missing a free throw. That's shooting the ball out of the stadium. There are public criticisms all the time, but none of them make mention of the scientific research currently being done on mediums. So I hope John Oliver and his team listen to this next section. They're obviously brilliant people.

They just need to look in the telescope. As I mentioned, mediums have been studied for a long time, like Harvard psychologist William James in the 1800s. Hey, maybe you should have gotten a medium to interview him for you. Very funny, Matt, but this isn't your tryout for John Oliver. Today, the Windbridge Research Center is running controlled studies on mediums. I spoke to their director of research, Dr. Julie Beischel. So my training is in hard science. I was getting a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology with a minor in microbiology and immunology. I'm kind of shocked that a person with that kind of scientific pedigree studies mediums. Is that surprising to you at all?

She had a transformative personal experience with the medium that led her to apply her scientific rigor to this area, which I find pretty brave, actually. Didn't know what a medium was. I'd never heard of it. My family's super Catholic. I saw a medium on TV. So I got a reading, my one and only reading I've ever had from a local medium. And when I left, there were definitely things that if nothing else made me go, oh, well, this is different. This is something that I can't explain. And then there were like things I didn't know. And I had to check with family members to

verify the information. And I was in graduate school at the time. And I brought that experience back to school. And I told other students and some of my professors just dismissed it outright. No, those people are all frauds. You got duped. And that really made me mad because this whole group of people have these experiences to call them all frauds. That's tremendously unfair. And they need a scientist to really bring this phenomena into the lab and test it. I've been doing this research with mediums full time for more than 15 years now. Dr. Beischel knows the criticisms about mediumship.

But like a lot of other scientists we've talked to, she's hoping to reduce all legitimate skepticism to get people to look in the telescope. Her studies explicitly control for the cheap tricks John Oliver mentioned in the segment you showed me. Here's what I mean. Matt, do you know what double-blind means? After seven episodes, I finally do kind of know the answer to this. It's a way to reduce any error in experiments, right? It's sort of the protocol of good science.

Right. Well, Dr. Beischel's studies are even more rigorous. So our protocol is quintuple-blind. I wrote a methodology paper in 2007 detailing it's like a 35-page journal article. It's really, really complicated. So how do you study whether mediumship is real? Do I need unthreatening science music? I'm going to say no, this is doable.

Dr. Beischel gets on the phone with a medium. But Dr. Beischel isn't getting a reading for herself, it's a reading for someone else. Let's say it's for Lucy. In this case, Lucy would be what they call a sitter, a person who has a deceased loved one. Lucy is someone who volunteered to be in the study, not a friend or a relative or anything, a stranger. Let's say Lucy wants to hear from her deceased father, Rick. Dr. Beischel, not Lucy, gets on the phone with the medium and only gives the first name Rick.

No last names. So it's not like someone is being Googled or checked out on LinkedIn. Think about how thoughtfully this experiment was designed. The medium can't know anything about Lucy because Lucy isn't on the phone, and the medium can't do research because the medium only gets the name Rick. There are no leading questions either. And then I asked the medium specific questions about the deceased person. What did they look like in their life? Describe their personality.

What were their hobbies or activities? How did they die? Do they have any specific messages for the absent sitter? So if you're keeping track, no one can be short-cutting either the medium is getting it right or not. Okay, possible dumb question alert. There have to be a lot of deceased people named Rick.

So how do they know it's the right Rick? They have a scoring system to see if the reading was accurate or not. The sitter scores that list of items as well as a list from somebody else's dead person. So they don't know which is theirs. So the sitter is blinded. The medium is blinded. I'm blinded of information. You can't accidentally spill the beans of, oh, it's this reading is yours or whatever, because they don't, no one knows. Everything's blinded.

Dr. Beischel used her protocols to test mediums. And what she found in two published peer-reviewed papers is that mediums are able to get information on dead people beyond what chance would predict. Okay, so what's the catch here? The research is in its early stages. We have some compelling results, but I'm not sure we're ready to say we've officially, without a doubt, proven mediumship yet. We need to study it more. And how do you do that?

With funding and with recognition. And when everyone says that what you're studying is impossible, you can't get either. Imagine going to the president of Harvard and saying, I need $10 million to study mediumship. Not to fund scholarships for the basketball team. We need to study talking to dead people. In our current climate, that would never happen. Here's what Dr. Jeff Kripal told me. He's a professor at Rice University.

You know, to do real science, you have to do it in dozens, if not hundreds of institutions, and you actually have to fund it. The truth is that most of the work being done on these psychical or paranormal phenomena are poorly funded. We're not pouring millions and millions of dollars into them like we do cancer research or military technology. That's not a value judgment or a suggestion that we should stop researching those things. I'm just pointing out that hardly anyone funds studies on the paranormal.

So what Dr. Beischel's team is doing is even more amazing in that context. The pressure is on to do it right. You have to be perfectly buttoned up to even suggest studying this stuff. To explain is Helene Wabe from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It's really fascinating to see how people just blatantly say, no, no, it's not possible. I don't even care what you got on your study. You shouldn't even ask it because it doesn't fit with what I know about the world right now.

So it shouldn't surprise anyone that when Dr. Beischel and her team tried to publish their results in a mainstream journal, they got rejected, simply due to the subject matter. I've said throughout the show, and I'll say it again here, we're in the infancy of understanding how consciousness works. But there is science already out there suggesting mediumship is possible. This is not to say, hey everyone, go see a medium. I'm definitely not saying that. What I'm saying is that when John Oliver says this, For anyone who does believe in psychic powers, I know there is nothing I could say that could convince you otherwise.

Logic isn't the reason that you believe in them, and it won't be the reason that you stop. Actually, logic is telling me we need to keep studying mediumship. Are we going to dismiss things that seem hard to believe, or are we going to be scientific and actually study the evidence? How about we hear from some mediums to see how they do it? That's what I'm talking about. Let's do that right after this. The most frustrating feeling is when you're trying to sleep, but you can't get your brain to quiet down and let you drift off. This happens to me all the time, especially the nights a new episode of my podcast comes out.

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off their first order of $15 or more when you download the DoorDash app and enter the promo code MIND, M-I-N-D. That's $5 off your first order when you download the DoorDash app from the app store and enter the promo code MIND. Don't forget, that's promo code MIND for $5 off your first order when you download the DoorDash app from the App Store and enter the promo code MIND. Don't forget, that's promo code MIND for $5 off your first order from DoorDash. The first medium I spoke with, Matt, is Laura Lynn Jackson. She's a certified medium for Dr. Beischel's Windbridge Research Center. She's a certified medium for Dr. and another one who's two years older. And I gave him all this information about himself

and he was a little terrified of me at first. He's like, are you a stalker? I'm like, no, no, I'm just psychic. Yeah, she's good. Her clients agree. You know, unfortunately I had to close my wait list. It's honestly a decade long. Pretty good.

Here's how she does it. I'm really just a telephone. You know, it's not me who's doing it. It's, it's, I'm a conductor of that. You know, I think there is a physiological aspect to it in my brain, but I think we all have it. This may not sound weird to the listener anymore. Remember, your brain just gets in the way of consciousness. Mediums aren't thinking of the answer. They're getting it by letting the information flow into them. Let me be clear. This will never not be weird to me. So what's the deal? Are dead people seeking out mediums to communicate with? Is it like 24-7? I wondered this too. You know, if every time I went to, let's say, the grocery store, I was, you know, getting information on people's loved ones from the other side as they passed me in the aisle, that would be very distracting.

So for me, it's very easy for me to slam that kind of door shut to the other side, the mediumship door, and open it kind of when I actively want to do a reading. In fact, she's actually had her brain scanned. Turns out, the scans confirm mediumship information appears differently than psychic information. It seems like talking to dead people uses a different part of the brain than just plain psychic stuff like telepathy. So can she do telepathy too?

Everyone's telepathic, remember? But yeah, she's got a lot going on. I spoke to another medium named Laura Powers. Wait, that Laura Powers? Matt has heard me mention Laura Powers many times. She deserves special recognition. In episode one, I mentioned that I heard a podcast in August of 2016 that set me down this path. It was a show called Extreme Health Radio. Great show. Shout out to host Justin Stellman. I just happened to hear an interview with Laura Powers on that show. That led me to check out her own podcast called Healing Powers, which was the first domino leading to my eventual research,

which changed my life completely. Without Laura Powers or Extreme Health Radio, this show wouldn't have happened. Big thanks to them. Back to mediumship. Here's Laura Powers. My master's is in poli sci. I was an appointed official. I was a planning commissioner. I was the chair of the public art committee in my community. And so I never thought in a million years that I was going to be a professional psychic, but that's, you know, kind of how it turned out. I went in for help to help myself. And through the process, people started to tell me, wow, you're really good at this. And then it just kind of developed from there.

Yeah. Apparently she knew she had some special gifts as a child, but shut them out because she wanted to live a normal life. Hard to blame her for that. As many people do, it kind of chooses them, people who have this path. But I really tried to ignore it for as long as I could. I grew up thinking I was actually crazy because it was pretty clear to me that other people didn't see and sense the things that I did. I was very much in many ways like the little kid in the sixth sense where I saw spirits, earthbound spirits. Sometimes I confused them with live people. One time I even called the cops on a ghost

because I thought he was an intruder in the house. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What am I supposed to make of this? We're talking about actual ghosts? Yeah, kind of, Matt. This is worth a quick aside. Ever heard of Alan Turing? Yeah, he was the computer genius guy

breaking enemy codes in World War II, right? Right. Here's what he wrote in 1950. Quote, the statistical evidence for telepathy is overwhelming. And then he goes on to say that once you accept telepathy, quote, it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts. Wow. He got it. Once we accept consciousness is beyond the body, all these other phenomena become possible. I don't have much more to say about ghosts other than I get asked about them a lot. I've never seen one personally. The evidence is by definition anecdotal, but I'll say this. Under our theory of consciousness, ghosts are definitely possible. Okay, back to the thing we were originally talking about.

What's it like to be in communication with dead people as a medium? Here's Laura Powers. I can somewhat manage the conversation. So with, let's say, mediumship, so if I'm trying to connect with a loved one on the other side, what I always tell people is I can invite someone, but I cannot make them show up or make them talk. So kind of like, you know, I can pick up the phone and call them, but they have to answer. That said, most of the time, loved ones are, you know, wanting to be available, but there are times when occasionally they'll happen that they're not there. This can explain why mediums sometimes don't get it right. It's just like a human conversation. So you need both people to be talking. The medium can't help it if the dead person won't talk.

Okay, but how do we know why, or when, a dead person would pick up the phone, so to speak? Could the wrong dead person pick up the phone? I wish I could give you a better answer to this, Matt. The problem is, we don't know the rules to the game. And anyone who says they do, including mediums, is guessing. We're dealing with the unseen. Who knows how it really works? Remember Katherine Yunt from episode four, when she talked about finding a missing hiker by

smelling blueberry pies? Yeah, I think her story was so incredible we had to bleep out me swearing afterwards. When Katherine's husband passed away, she began communicating with him, And now she's a professional medium. Professionally, I was a high school math and French teacher. And now I'm a professional medium, psychic, channel, and counselor. So quite a switch. She's actually been tested at the University of Arizona for her abilities. Mediumship for me is I make contact with a loved one or they contact me sometimes and I deliver the message, but it's me delivering the message. I'm like the medium, the person in the middle, so to speak. And then when they show up, it's interesting because they show up with their personality as it was while they were here so that they can be recognized or identified.

they were here so that they can be recognized or identified. So they're funny or they're sad or they're mad or they're intellectual or whatever they are. Catherine Yunt was part of a mediumship case that got some recognition. Paul Davids is a Hollywood producer, author, and Princeton psychology major like me. His colleague, Forrest Ackerman, passed away. They called him Fari. David said he started receiving communications from Fari, so he detailed them in a book called An Atheist in Heaven. He wrote about 142 distinct moments he can't explain. He contacted Katherine Junt to

see if she could communicate with Fari, and this is what happened. I filmed about an hour of Catherine Hunt. And I have to say, it blew me away. She had so many things that came through that were so absolutely right for Fari. All kinds of details, even the nature of his quirky sense of humor. And there were even some things that she threw at me there that at the time didn't make any sense to me, but made sense to me later. Paul's stories give me goosebumps. I can't do justice to them in a small amount of time. You can listen to that interview in its entirety, along with all of my other interviews at markgober.com slash podcast.

Okay. So you've said telepathy and remote viewing are innate skills. Is mediumship? Potentially. It's unclear exactly why some people are able to communicate with dead people better than others. That said, some people might have brains that are better configured to do it naturally. Okay, so here's my question that probably everyone is asking. Is it a good idea to get a reading from a medium? In my journey when I started this, in addition to reading books, I worked with tons of psychics and mediums. I was exploring and curious. Sure enough,

some were able to get information that I couldn't explain over the phone without knowing about me. A few times, I was really blown away. I would caution people though, it's easy to be bedazzled by psychics. One great psychic I spoke to said to think of his reading as a big painting. Look at the painting, not the brushstrokes. Remember, the studies on psychics don't say accuracy is 100%. Far from it. So we should expect a bunch of stuff to be wrong. Also, we're dealing with the unseen, so who knows where the information is coming from. Sometimes it's from an unnamed source, from a being you've never heard of. Talented psychics consistently tell me, just like on earth there are good and bad people, it's the same in the unseen world. So it can be fun to try,

just don't spend all your savings on it, and don't immediately change your whole life because the psychic tells you to. Exercise caution and discernment. I mentioned a moment ago that everyone, in theory, could have the ability to communicate with the dead, not just mediums. Well, this seems to happen to regular people quite often. not just mediums. Well, this seems to happen to regular people quite often. Listeners, have you ever felt like this has happened to you? You're not alone if so. To make another Sixth Sense reference, is this an I see dead people scenario?

Dr. Jan Holden from the University of North Texas, who you heard from in the NDE episodes, says after-death communications are generally not scary like horror movies or anything. So after-death communication is the experience of a living person having the experience of communicating somehow or being in the presence of a deceased entity. People experience this as very real, often very matter-of-fact. It's not at all spooky or scary the way it's depicted a lot of times in the media. And that entity is usually a loved one, but it can be a stranger and it can be an animal, like people have had after-death communication with their pets. Dr. Holden told me about research suggesting that roughly one in three people report after-death communications. One in three. Are all of them legit? Who knows. But if any of them are, that's seriously a big

deal. So listeners, does this sound familiar? It can involve a visual experience or auditory, like hearing someone's voice. It can be olfactory, like smelling a scent that was very unique to a particular person, like a certain cigar or perfume that they wore. It can also be just the sense of presence without any actual sensory content at all. Just a knowing that this deceased individual is there. All right, let me tip my hand a little. I've been a skeptic all season, but I've had personal experiences where I've felt, particularly during meditation, that I've been a skeptic all season, but I've had personal experiences where I've felt, particularly during meditation, that I've been able to hear my dad's voice. He passed away in 2013. Now, I'm not sure I'm able to say that's exactly what happens, but it certainly felt real to me. Matt, thank you for sharing that. And my reaction is, like we've said, just because

something is potentially comforting, assuming that's how you felt, doesn't mean we should assume it's false. So in case a listener out there has had a similar experience, is there any actual proof that these after-death communications aren't just in our heads? Or does it just make sense within your framework? Yes, we talked about veridical, verified memories from NDEs a few episodes ago. There are examples of veridical after-death communications, too. ago. There are examples of veridical after-death communications, too. I know another case where a person needed insurance money but had looked high and low and could not find the policy. And then one day, just going through normal daily activity, suddenly heard the parent's voice say, go into this closet and look behind here

and you'll find the insurance policy. And no one ever would have known to look there if the person hadn't been clued in by an after-death communication from the parent. I've said this before, but I'm not able to personally validate any single case. But these after-death communications have stopped sounding weird to me, actually, because we've spent seven episodes piling up evidence that consciousness exists beyond the brain.

I know there are many people out there who have had similar experiences to Matt's, where they've felt like a deceased loved one was communicating with them, and they have felt guilty, embarrassed, or like they shouldn't pay attention. I hope they don't anymore. I mean, we can't know for sure, but who knows, maybe you did hear from someone. If consciousness exists beyond death, and we're suggesting it does, it's certainly not impossible. So, if we say consciousness survives when the body dies, then why couldn't that consciousness then enter another body? On to our final piece of evidence, the studies on children who remember previous lives. There's a group of scientists at the University of Virginia who, for the last 50 years, have studied

over 2,500 cases of children with distinct memories of previous lives. Dr. Ian Stevenson started this groundbreaking research. He passed away and now Dr. Jim Tucker runs it. Tucker is a child psychiatrist and director of UVA's Division of Perceptual Studies. The kids in these cases are usually between two and five years old. The details they can provide are sometimes so vivid that the researchers can find medical or historical records that corroborate exactly what the kids say. This makes no sense to me. How can someone remember something from someone else's life? They're not remembering someone else's life, they're remembering their own consciousness that existed in another body. Again, if your consciousness is in the whirlpool when it dissipates, why

couldn't it form a new whirlpool, or become part of another one that's about to be created? We don't know exactly how this recycling of consciousness might work, but I'm open to it because of what we know about consciousness otherwise. Is it a red flag to you that we're relying on two to five year olds for this information? Let's hear a case from Dr. Tucker. I'll let you decide. A little five-year-old boy, Ryan, for the last year had talked about a life in Hollywood and about wanting to go home to Hollywood. And he would cry and beg his mother to take him home to Hollywood. At one point, she got some books from the public library about Hollywood to try to help him kind of process

all this. And they were looking through one one day when they came to this picture from an old movie called Night After Night. And he pointed to one of the fellows in the picture and said, hey, mama, that's George. We did a picture together. And then he said, and Mama, that guy's me. I found me, as he pointed to another person. Well, the first one he pointed to is George Raft, who back in the day was a well-known movie actor. But the second one he pointed to, the one that he said he had been, was an extra who had no lines in the movie. And eventually, with the help of a Hollywood archivist, we were able to figure out who this was. It was a man named Marty Martin.

I'm on IMDb right now. It says Marty Martin was in one movie in 1932, so he's pretty obscure. So how could they possibly confirm that this is the same person Ryan's talking about? This seems like a coincidence. Ryan said how he had danced on stage in New York and Marty Martin danced on Broadway. Ryan said that he then went to Hollywood and worked in the movies, which Marty Martin did mostly working on dancing in the movies. Ryan said that he then worked for an agency and Marty Martin started a successful talent agency.

Ryan said how he'd seen the world from big ships and talked about going to Paris. And Marty Martin and his wife went to Europe on the Queen Mary. And then we've got a picture of them in Paris. Ryan said how he had a big house with a swimming pool, which Marty Martin did. And Ryan said that the street address had the word rock or mount in it. And Marty Martin lived on North Roxbury. Ryan also said one time that he didn't know why God would let you get to 61 and then make you come back again as a baby. Well, Marty Martin's death certificate said that he was 59,

but when I looked into it, I found out that, in fact, he was 61. Both his daughter and his stepson said he was 61. And then I found census records and marriage listings that all gave ages that meant Marty Martin was 61 when he died. So Ryan was right about that, even though the death certificate was wrong. And all together, we were able to verify that over 50 of Ryan's statements were accurate for Marty Martin's life. I love that story. We could spend an hour just focusing on some of the more amazing details.

Marty Martin's consciousness seemed to be reborn as Ryan. The details he described were so accurate. How could he have made this up? He's five. But Matt, remember, Dr. Tucker and his colleagues have studied thousands of cases at UVA. We only have time for a few highlights, like this one. Well, I think the case of James Leininger is pretty darn solid. Just after his second birthday, he started having horrible nightmares several times a week in which he'd be kicking his legs up in the air and screaming, airplane crashed on fire, little man can't get out. And I talked with his aunt after I met with James and his parents, and she had spent a lot of time with them when James was little. And she said she couldn't believe how

difficult these nightmares were to witness, that it really looked like somebody fighting for his life. And then during the day, James would take his little toy airplanes and say, airplane crash on fire and slam them nose first into the family's coffee table. So he really looked like a kid who had been traumatized. This again is all when he was two years old, but he described how his plane had crashed on fire, how it had been shot down by the Japanese. And he said that he flew a Corsair. Now, I've never heard of a Corsair, but it was a special plane that was developed during World War II. He also said that he flew off of a boat and his parents asked him the name of the boat. And he said Natoma, which I think is quite an unusual answer to give the question

of an American aircraft carrier. But when his dad did an internet search, he eventually came across material on the USS Natoma Bay, which was this escort carrier that was stationed in the Pacific during World War II. When James is 28 months old, Natoma was part of the story. They also asked him who he was, and he always said just me or James, which they didn't make anything of. They also asked him one time who else was there, and he said Jack, Jack Larson. And then when he was two and a half, he pointed at a picture of Iwo Jima and said that's where his plane had

been shot down. And it turned out that the USS Natoma Bay did, in fact, take part in the Iwo Jima operation. And they had one and only one pilot from the ship that was killed during that operation. It was a young man from Pennsylvania named James Houston. He, in fact, had flown a Corsair. He was flying a different plane when he was killed, but he definitely had flown a Corsair. He was flying a different plane when he was killed, but he definitely had flown a Corsair. And his plane crashed exactly as James had described. James had said how his plane got shot in the engine, it burst into flames, crashed in the ocean, and quickly sank.

And that's exactly what happened with Houston's plane. And the pilot of the plane next to Houston's on the day that he was killed was in fact Jack Larson. What do you think, Matt? Was James's consciousness recycled? This is some of the most amazing stuff we've talked about in the whole show. I don't really know what to do with it. Matt, we're both Americans. Around the world, reincarnation is not viewed with the same skepticism that it is here. And it all fits with our theory of consciousness that it's not tied to our bodies. A quick question here.

Can adults remember previous lives or is it just children? Some adults do claim to remember previous lives. But here's a hypothesis. Two to five year olds seem to be in the sweet spot where children A, have language, and B, they're so young that they have fewer clouds, so to speak, blocking them from the stream of pure consciousness. Also, it's possible that many children speak of previous lives, but their parents dismiss them so we never hear about it. One last point. it. One last point. There are children who have deformities or birthmarks that match how they reported to have died in a previous life. These are children that are born with birthmarks or birth defects that match wounds, usually the fatal wounds on the body of the previous person.

So the child will remember the past life and also have a birthmark, which is often an unusual birthmark. There was a little boy where the previous person was killed by a shotgun blast to the side of his head. And this child was born with just a stub for an ear and actually an underdeveloped right side of his face. Ian also listed 18 cases where the child was born with two birthmarks,

ones that matched both the entrance wound and the exit wound on the body of a gunshot victim. Dr. Ian Stevenson wrote over 2,000 pages examining cases like this. Okay, it kind of makes sense to me

that a whirlpool could dissipate and then it could reform as a new whirlpool. But that's your mind we're talking about, not your body. So how do you explain this? We use Dr. Kastrup's whirlpool analogy because it's simple to understand, but reality is probably way more complex. That said, here's an attempt. An individual person is a manifestation of the whirlpool, and that manifestation can take the form of memories and personality, but also physical traits. So in the recycling of the whirlpool, it seems that certain physical traits get transferred too. Having read Dr. Stevenson's work myself, I can tell you he was a methodical researcher.

In 1975, the Journal of the American Medical Association said, quote, in regard to reincarnation, Stevenson has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds. The Journal of the American Medical Association suggested reincarnation is possible over 40 years ago. And we're still sitting here in 2019 debating if it's real or not. The physical cases are also significant from a medical standpoint because traditionally medicine says only two things

can influence our physical body, our genetics and our environment. But here, the children's bodies are physically different because of something that's not related to genetics and not related to environment. Dr. Ian Stevenson called it a possible third factor. Matt, can you imagine if our current medicine is missing an entire factor? If your previous lives affect your current life, then what happened in our previous life is related to our current body. Who knows what this understanding might uncover? What's at stake

here? Curing a major disease? That's why we have to take this stuff seriously and at least explore it. If that's true, then maybe there are massive medical breakthroughs that can be made. Matt, you look like your head's about to explode. I feel like it might explode. We went from mediums to reincarnation and I just don't know what to think anymore, man. Should we wrap this thing up? Yeah, we better. So what did we talk about today?

We looked at mediums, after-death communications, and children with past life memories. All of these separate areas of evidence suggest consciousness can persist when the body dies. And that's on top of all the psychic phenomena we discussed and near-death experiences. It's a potentially comforting idea to know our consciousness doesn't end when we die. But what does it all mean for how we think about our lives? That's what we'll be exploring next in the season finale. This has been Where Is My Mind. Thank you for listening to Where Is My Mind. The show was written by me, Mark Gober, and the show was produced at Blue Duck Media

by Matt Ford and Gabe Goodwin, with help from Antonio Enriquez, Zuri Irvin, and Ben Redmond. The show is edited by Andy Jaskiewicz. Special thanks to Cadence 13, particularly John McDermott and Patrick Antonetti. Also thanks to Bill Gladstone and Waterside Publishing. All of my full-length interviews are available at markgober.com slash podcast. We'd like to thank our sponsors, and if you'd like to support the show, Thank you.