AN excerpt from the last page of the above citation:

"ON the fringes of legitimate science, some researchers persist in studying consciousness and its durability beyond the body. Though Dr. Tucker, who directs the Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic at the University of Virginia, has few kind words for regression therapy or its practitioners, he continues to be committed to the scientific study of what can only be called reincarnation.

He is carrying on the pioneering research of his mentor, Dr. Ian Stevenson, who beginning in the 1960s collected more than 2,000 accounts of children between the ages of 2 and 7 who seemed to remember previous lives vividly without the help of hypnosis.

Dr. Stevenson did most of his casework in Asia, where belief in reincarnation is common. There he found a child born with a deformed hand who remembered having his fingers chopped off in a previous life (Dr. Stevenson went to the village the child recalled and verified that such an incident had taken place), and Burmese children who said they had previously been Japanese soldiers killed in World War II and preferred sushi over their native cuisine.

Dr. Tucker studies American children and in one case found a young boy who started to say, around the age of 18 months, that he was his own (deceased) grandfather. 'He eventually told details of his grandfather's life that his parents felt certain he could not have learned through normal means,' Dr. Tucker wrote in Explore, which calls itself a journal of science and healing, 'such as the fact that his grandfather's sister had been murdered and that his grandmother had used a food processor to make milkshakes for his grandfather every day at the end of his life.'

Dr. Tucker won't say such cases add up to proof of reincarnation, but he likes to keep an open mind.

'There can be something that survives after the death of the brain and the death of the body that is somehow connected to a new child,' he said. 'I have become convinced that there is more to the world than the physical universe. There's the mind piece, which is its own entity.'"

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It's odd that given case histories of this sort, which the mind=brain only model cannot account for, those who rebut the case as "anecdotal and therefore unreliable" do not have any other hypothesis to offer; they instinctively opt for the explanation that the data must be false, or cooked somehow.

Of course that implies a large number of people cooking up data around the same theme, if you delve into the number of case histories involved. Maybe it's a conspiracy???? :D


A