Reincarnation research
Wikipedia contributors · 2024 · Wikipedia
This source is used as context evidence across 3 linked claims and 4 related evidence hubs. Its citation record is marked verified; that verifies the source trail, not the truth of any linked claim.
Summary
Review of the academic research programme on reported past-life memories, including methodological critiques.
How this source is used on the map
Companion to the UVa DOPS institutional page; covers the case-study methodology and the major sceptical objections.
Citation record
- Authors
- Wikipedia contributors
- Year
- 2024
- Publication
- Wikipedia
- Source type
- Secondary summary
- Map role
- context
- Credibility level
- secondary
- Citation status
- Verified
- DOI
- Not recorded
- PubMed
- Not recorded
- Not recorded
Linked claims
A subset of past-life cases include birthmarks or birth defects whose location matches reported wounds — sometimes with autopsy verification.
Decades of cases of young children making specific, verifiable claims about a deceased stranger's life — across many cultures, with reproducible sub-patterns (≈70% violent deaths, family-rebirth clusters).
If past-life cases are taken seriously, reincarnation is the most economical narrative — but several other models also fit the data.
Related evidence hubs
Children's past-life memories, birthmark cases, and the rebirth interpretation.
Past-life memories, karma, soul contracts.
Whether anything of mind continues.
World religions and traditions, scored as systems.
Related research reports
A source-linked synthesis of past-life memory cases, birthmark claims, reincarnation interpretations, and skeptical alternatives.
A comparative guide to the strongest survival-adjacent evidence: NDEs, terminal lucidity, deathbed visions, past-life memories, mediumship, and after-death communication.
A balanced synthesis of the strongest and weakest evidence across afterlife, consciousness, reincarnation, mystical, psi, and practice claims.
Related sources
The leading academic group publishing on cases of children claiming past-life memories and on Greyson's NDE work.
Direct background for any claim about whether something of the person survives death, and a useful guardrail against treating survival as a single simple proposition.
Any claim about surviving death or being reincarnated presupposes a theory of personal identity. This entry sets the terms.
Useful for the breadth of the concept across traditions, and for keeping doctrinal reincarnation distinct from empirical child-memory case research.
The institutional home for serious empirical work on past-life memories and survival-related anomalies.
Exactly the sort of review the user-facing example refers to — written by the principal investigator at DOPS.