Twenty-five years after Old Souls original publication a brand new Spanish translation has been published by Errata Naturae Editores in Madrid. As a result, I’ve been doing interviews with Spanish media, including the country’s largest newspaper El Mundo. Their reporter sent me a list of excellent questions. Here they are with my responses:
Questions for Tom Shroder about his book Old Souls
- I want to be honest from the start. I am an incorrigible skeptic. And yet, I really enjoyed your book. I cannot believe in reincarnation in any way, but I do enjoy a good story, and this is one of the best. Did something similar happen to you at the beginning?
Yes. The way I got onto this subject was by writing a skeptical magazine article for the Miami Herald’s Tropic Magazine about a quite respected local psychiatrist named Brian Weiss who became a bestselling author with a book about patients who he believed had been hypnotically regressed to memories of past lives. I didn’t find the cases he detailed at all persuasive. The so-called past-lives recounted by these people didn’t have any elements that couldn’t have been gleaned from reading histories or even historical novels. Plus, the process of hypnosis, which I underwent myself for this article, literally asked the subject to give their imagination free reign. Some of the subjects in what he considered his most persuasive cases even contradicted themselves, or talked about two lives in the same time period. But in doing research for the article I came across some obscure academic articles about a Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University fo Virginia who for 30 years had been very quietly investigating reports of small children who spontaneously began talking about what sounded like previous lives. They tell their parents things like, “You’re not my real parents, my real parents live in such-and-such a town.” They’d sometimes give complete names, and describe details of their supposed previous lives, including names of siblings, spouses and children and details of significant events, possessions, beliefs — information specific enough to a single now-deceased person that the family of that person could be located, and the statements made by the child checked against the true details of the “previous personality’s” life. In many cases, Stevenson found the details matched to an astounding degree, and he found no obvious connection between the child and the previous personality that could explain how the child – often just learning to talk – could have possibly known about them. In Stevenson’s very dry accounts, published in academic journals or through academic publishing houses, he interviewed not only the children but their parents and any witnesses to the child’s statements as well as the previous family and witnesses to the moments when the child encountered the previous family for the first time. He was looking to check the veracity of the accounts, and to find any other normal way the child could have come up with the information. When I told my wife about this she said, “That’s who you ought to be writing about.”
Of course the question became, how seriously should we take Stevenson’s work? He could have been an outright fraud, or someone putting his thumb on the scales in favor of believing these accounts, or simply not looking at them skeptically enough. I wanted to find out by following him on his field research and observing myself. At first Stevenson wanted no part of it – saying he thought journalists would sensationalize the work and make it even more unlikely that his professional peers would take them seriously – which was his main goal. But ultimately I persuaded him to let me accompany him, in no small part by pointing out that if after 30 years his peers hadn’t taken him seriously, he had very little to lose.
- Your stance throughout the book evolves from disbelief to amazement, and in the end, you seem deeply confused. At the end of the book, it seems like you can’t believe, but you wish you could. Is that correct?
I would say that I was presented with what seemed like an unsolvable conundrum. On the one hand, I found no sign of fraud, delusion or shoddy research in the cases I personally observed. If it had just been one or two cases, then I could have told myself there could have been coincidences or hidden factors that just weren’t visible, but it wasn’t just one or two cases, there were dozens of them, all presenting in nearly identical fashion, making it seem vanishingly unlikely that all of them could be explained by fraud, delusion, or misapprehension. On the other hand, Neither Stevenson nor anyone else could find even a shred of evidence for a mechanism that could account for how a personality could exist after physical death, or how even if it did exist how it could transfer to another human. In fact, the science kept building to show that all aspects of the brain and our experience could be tied to biochemical activity in the brain and body, all of which of course vanish with the physical destruction after death.
- It has been over twenty years since you wrote *Old Souls*. How has your relationship with the themes of the book evolved?
- In that time, has there been any significant scientific progress on the topic of reincarnation?
I actually answered both of those questions extensively in a piece I wrote for Psychology Today here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202407/familiar-strangers
- Please tell me about the fascinating Ian Stevenson. Was he a good scientist with an obsession that eventually unhinged him, as some of his colleagues seemed to describe?
Stevenson was a great man, in almost a 19th Century way. He was very courtly, very carefully spoken, and completely dedicated to his work, to the point where he often sacrificed his personal comfort and eventually his health. He had enormous personal integrity and an absolute belief in the scientific method. But I also think that after thirty years of careful investigation that never uncovered any adequate normal explanation for these cases, he was extremely frustrated that his colleagues continued to ignore his work, simply deciding a priori that reincarnation was a physical impossibility and therefore any supposed evidence for it was not worth examining. He didn’t necessarily want anyone to conclude that reincarnation was a fact, he just wanted them to take a close and unbiased look at this phenomenon of children spontaneously spouting information about having lived a previous life, which had turned out to be worldwide and not all that uncommon.
- It’s interesting that in Stevenson’s interviews with children around the world, there are more frustrations than successes… I think he didn’t master the languages of his informants, and that they weren’t very eager to speak with a Western adult. You accompanied him on his travels for six months. How do you remember him in the field?
When I accompanied him, he always had a local researcher fluent in both language and culture whom he trusted fully to translate all his questions and to interact with the subjects appropriately, and then translate back their responses with explanation of the cultural context when necessary. I actually had been a cultural anthropology major in college, and the methods were identical to those of ethnographical field work.
- And what were those children like? Because a child who is not yet able to separate reality from imagination and might be influenced by adults doesn’t exactly seem like the best source of information.
The possibilities that these cases could be explained by a childhood propensity to have an imaginary friend, or just a childish flight of fancy, or that the children were influenced by adults were always at the top of his mind. It was pretty obvious that those were the easiest explanation for this phenomenon, and he took great care to address that. As to the first possibility of childhood imagination, that would of course not explain how a child managed to come up with verifiable details of the life of a dead stranger. And as far as adults feeding a child that information, aside from the apparent lack of any connections between the child’s family and the family of the deceased person, there were quite a few cases where the adults had no interest in having a child who remembered a previous life, or in fact actively repressed or even punished the child for making claims. These families were embarrassed or injured by the child’s insistence on the memories, and clearly would not have influenced the child in that direction. In other cases, even in cultures where reincarnation was an accepted belief, the children’s accounts actually went against the details of the belief — for instance the Druze believed reincarnation occurred instantly after death, but these kids had the awkward habit of insisting they had the personality of someone who had died months or years before their birth — making unlikely that adults were feeding them the information to support their own religious dogma.
In my experience, all the children we met, and the adults who’d had past life memories when they were children, seemed otherwise completely normal, and totally uninterested in whether we believed them or not. They were doing us a favor by agreeing to talk to us, and my gut feeling was they were recounting what to them at least was a completely authentic experience and appropriate emotions. A European psychiatrist had given a selection of these children psychological tests and compared them to their peers. They were on average of slightly higher intelligence and without any sign of mental derangement.
- You yourself acknowledge that the biggest issue with reincarnation is finding the exact mechanism: how it happens precisely. Is there any theory about this that you find plausible or particularly appealing?
None. And that’s my big dilemma, as I discuss at length in the 25th anniversary afterword attached.
- What other serious objections do you think can be raised against reincarnation? For instance, the missing souls?
I think the lack of even a theoretically plausible mechanism is such an overwhelming objection that anything else is splitting hairs. But from a personal, theoretical view, since probably at least 99 percent of us have no previous life memories whatsoever, I have to ask myself, even if we are reincarnated, if we have no memory of our previous lives, then how is that a meaningful difference from us not having previously existed at all? If I think about it carefully, I realize that what’s important to me, what I fear losing at death, is actually the narrative of my life. Who are we if not a story of our personal history? And if that history totally disappears, then in the only sense meaningful to me, so have I.
- And isn’t it easier to think that reincarnation is just one more of the understandable self-deceptions humans use to cope with the fear of their own death and that of their loved ones?
In the book, I write about making a connection in London on one of our field trips and taking the train to Heathrow. As the train passed a cemetery I saw out the window a couple standing by a fresh grave, actually physically caved in by grief, by the knowledge that whoever was buried under that freshly turned dirt was lost to them for all eternity. So yes, the denial of death is perhaps the greatest psychological impulse in all human lives. So it cannot be underestimated when you are considering any claims about reincarnation. Yet real scientific investigation must be open to fairly examining evidence of anomalous phenomena, regardless of how they challenge what we believe to be true.
- Forgive the joke to end on. With the way our profession is going, do you at least hope that after you die, you won’t be reincarnated as a journalist?
Well I am very fortunate. I’m 70 years old and began my career in journalism at 20. That half century timespan was probably the best time to be a journalist in all of history. It pains me to say this, but if I were 20 today, I don’t think I could have had anything like the career I have had. In fact, I probably would have gone into some other field entirely.
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