The Scientist Who Tried to Prove Reincarnation

Can memories survive death? It sounds like the kind of question skeptics usually dismiss before the conversation even starts. But Ian Stevenson was not a carnival psychic or a late-night ghost hunter. He was a respected psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who spent decades investigating children who claimed to remember previous lives, along with cases involving birthmarks, apparitions, telepathy, and other alleged evidence for life after death. In this episode, psychologist and science writer Jesse Bering talks about Stevenson's strange and fascinating career, the psychology of afterlife belief, why the mind so easily imagines consciousness continuing after death, and what to do with cases that are hard to explain but far from proven. Jesse Bering is a science writer, research psychologist, and head of the Science Communication program at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is the author of several books, including: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human and Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves . His new book is The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson: One Scientist's Epic Quest for Evidence of Reincarnation, Apparitions, Poltergeists, and Other Matters of the Soul .

You can listen to The Scientist Who Tried to Prove Reincarnation online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

The Scientist Who Tried to Prove Reincarnation is an episode from The Michael Shermer Show by Michael Shermer.

This episode is 01:38:30 long.

This episode was published on May 2, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from The Michael Shermer Show when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.