Pod Insights Mayim Bialik's Breakdown Scientific Evidence of Past Lives, The Patterns in Famous Past Life Cases & How You Live Now Affects Your Afterlife with Dr. Jim Tucker About this episode What if death isn’t the end—but just the beginning of your next chapter? Could uncovering past lives reveal what happens in the afterlife? Do near death experiences reveal past lives?
Dr. Jim Tucker (author of Life Before Life), a leading child psychiatrist and former director at UVA’s Division of Perceptual Studies, dives into 2,000+ real cases of children who vividly remember past lives and provides real evidence and research to scientifically explain near-death experiences (NDEs). In this mind-blowing exploration, he uncovers eerie patterns in some of the most famous past life stories, explains why past life memories fade with age, reveals how trauma may link past deaths to new lives, and explores whether we can tap into our own past life memories. From the mysterious Akashic Records to extrasensory abilities and near-death experiences, this is a deep dive into reincarnation research, consciousness, and what it all means for your health, relationships, and how we should be living.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Mayim Bialik? My jaw is still on the floor because you're now talking about people who are no longer living, who are somehow transmitting information, or having their entire consciousness placed in another body.
0:15 Speaker 01 We've studied over 2,000 cases of young children who say they remember a past life. If you look at the cases, there is a consciousness realm that interacts with the physical reality, but is also apart from it. There are times when the consciousness comes back to this same reality in a young child.
0:38 Mayim Bialik? I can't, I'm freaking, I got chills up the back of my neck already.
0:42 Speaker 01 If you get data that conflicts with what you think you know of how the world works, well then you have to question what you think. I have become quite convinced that there's more than just the physical world, that there is this element or realm of consciousness first of all, and that we all have a piece of it.
1:02 Mayim Bialik? This is an enormous statement, so the notion is...
1:13 Mayim Bialik? As you may have heard, a few weeks back, we won two Webby Awards and a Gracie Award, and we wanted to say thank you. We could not be prouder. Thank you to everyone in our community who's been with us along the way and has supported our podcast. And before we start today's episode, we want to share some very big news. We are expanding the Mayim Bialik's Breakdown Universe on Substack. That's right. Next week, we are launching a special new community for the Mayim Bialik's Breakdown Community, so that we can connect in deeper and more meaningful ways. If you go over to Substack and you subscribe, you will get Weekly Lives, where Jonathan and I reflect on the episodes, and we offer new insights.
1:57 Mayim Bialik? You will also get access to my personal writing, so we strongly suggest subscribe and follow us over there. I already have some posts in the works about my time on the Big Bang Theory, my time throughout my acting career. ...as well as discussing some of the most frequently hot topics that we cover in mental health, wellbeing and spirituality here on MBB. We're also going to be from Substack, reviewing episodes, talking about current events and answering individual questions. If you choose to become a paid supporter, which I hope that you will, you'll also get additional Monday check-ins, a ton of bonus podcast content that's never been seen before, personal messages from me and Jonathan, access to the community chat, also special episodes with amazing expert guests that you cannot see anywhere else, and a lot of
2:42 Mayim Bialik? other totally awesome features. It's all going to be on our Substack. We're on a journey here to figure out who we are, what we can do to feel better, to live better, and we all know that opening our minds and hearts can help us achieve things that we never believed possible. That's what our podcast has been seeking to do for almost 300 episodes, and that's what we're continuing to do, and we're going to do it as we expand on Substack. So please, head over to our Substack right now, MyMBiAlex Breakdown. Check out the different tiers that we have available. There's also a free plan that includes access to the MBB newsletter, which will live exclusively on Substack, bonus clips from select episodes, Monday teases of the week's episodes. So no matter what you choose, you will get awesome things that you can only get on Substack. We're very proud of what we're creating here.
3:27 Mayim Bialik? We could not have done it without all of you. Please come join us, be a part of the MBB community on Substack as we all thrive and seek to be healthier, happier and more inspired. Thank you from me, from Jonathan and from our entire team at MyMBiAlex Breakdown. We will see you on Substack. And now, on to the episode.
3:47 Mayim Bialik? Hi, I'm MyMBiAlex.
3:48 Jonathan Cohen? I'm Jonathan Cohen.
3:49 Mayim Bialik? And welcome to our Breakdown. We've talked about a lot of these paradigm shifting concepts that we're going to discuss today, but we have never discussed them with someone who is a psychiatrist, the head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. He has spent his entire career as a clinical psychiatrist, examining the possibility that when we die, our consciousness lives on.
4:16 Mayim Bialik? That's right, folks. We are talking today about a practical understanding of life after death. This is not floofy woofy. This is not, "I had a dream." This is, "What does it look like to do a systematic analysis of reports that are outside of our understanding of the experience of dying?" We're going to be speaking to Dr. Jim Tucker. He is a child psychiatrist. And for the past 25 years, he has dedicated his career both to a clinical practice, and he was the Bonner Lowry Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. He's the Director of the Division of Perceptual Studies.
5:00 Mayim Bialik? It's an extensive legitimate research group that explores the mind's relationship to the body, and specifically, the possibility that consciousness somehow survives after death. This is one of the most respected people in this field. And we get to ask him all of the questions that I'm sure you're dying to know. He's going to talk about specific examples. He's going to talk about some examples from his books, "Life Before Life" and "Return to Life." He's going to explain to us, in the most plain terms, what evidence can provide for us in terms of our understanding of what could fundamentally be the breaking down of our understanding of the material world, and what happens when we die.
5:45 Jonathan Cohen? Beautifully explained. He describes an example, many examples that he's studied, where children remember past lives and claim to be people from the past, with significant evidence that he says cannot be explained.
6:02 Mayim Bialik? And one of the most fascinating things about what him and his team do, and have done for the past 25 years, is they have examined over 2,000 of these cases to try and figure out what is possible that would explain this away, and what is statistically significantly impossible to explain many aspects of these experiences. So... He is the first one to say not every experience can be explained this way. Not every piece of evidence lines up, but for the ones that do, it is undeniable that something is going on here that is beyond our current understanding. And he's going to break down the science around that.
6:44 Mayim Bialik? We're so excited to welcome Dr. Jim B. Tucker to the Breakdown. Break it down. Dr. Tucker, welcome to the Breakdown.
6:53 Speaker 01 Thank you. Thanks very much for having me.
6:55 Mayim Bialik? So you come to us by way of Scott Barry Kaufman, who we had on our podcast. And then I sort of started doing a deep dive into all the people that he has had on his podcast. And you were one of the people that he sat in conversation with. And I said to Jonathan, we have to talk to Jim Tucker. So thank you for being here. A little bit about sort of what Jonathan and I do here is we talk a lot about the intersection of the science and spirituality. And we are very interested in phenomenal things. But we're also interested in the practical understanding of phenomenal things.
7:37 Mayim Bialik? You study something that is absolutely impossible for us to wrap our minds around with any linear, materialistic view of the world. Can you explain to people what you have dedicated your academic and clinical career to?
7:56 Speaker 01 Right. So as far as clinical career, I just did routine child psychiatry for decades. But on the research side, the academic side, I trained at UVA, but then I was in practice. But I came back to UVA to continue the work by Eden Stevenson, who was originally the chair of the Department of Psychiatry, and then had established this research division. And his particular interest was young children from all over the world who report that they remember a past life.
8:29 Mayim Bialik? You've already lost a lot of people just by saying that. So talk a little bit more about what Dr. Stevenson did and what you've continued.
8:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, so this is what we think is a serious minded look at this phenomenon to see, okay, what is happening here and is there evidence of survival after death? Is there evidence that these kids are actually remembering a past life? And again, it's not from a religious bent or anything like that. It's more of being as sort of objective as we can about it. So we've studied over 2,000 cases and you can find them essentially wherever you look, of young children who say they remember a past life.
9:19 Speaker 01 The question that we have is, are the details that they're giving, do they actually match somebody who did live in the past? And there are a number of cases where we can't determine that. So it really does not provide any evidence of continuation. But then there are the ones where we can.
9:40 Mayim Bialik? So, I mean, my jaw, like, I know what you do. I've read about you. I've listened to your, you know, other interviews you've done. My jaw is still on the floor because this, this is something that, you know, purports to sort of bend our very basic concept that when we die, we die. And even if you are willing to entertain something like, the spirit goes on, people remember you, maybe you even have a religious concept, you know, of some sort of existence,
10:20 Mayim Bialik? you're now talking about people who are no longer living, who are somehow transmitting information or having not just their identity, but kind of their entire consciousness placed in another body that then has consciousness enough to present that to a psychiatrist.
10:42 Speaker 01 That sounds odd to you. So, right. Now, I will say it doesn't come across to the kids as transmitting information that some that a deceased person is transmitting information to them. I mean, from their experiences, very much things that actually they did, things that happened to them when they were living before. Yeah, I mean, if you're purely taking a materialist view of reality, then these cases make no sense. So then you're kind of stuck dealing with, okay, well, what do I do with this evidence? And then what many people do is simply dismiss it. But that's not what we have chosen to do.
11:26 Speaker 01 And frankly, that doesn't seem very scientific, right? I mean, if you get data that conflicts with what you think you know of how the world works, well, then you have to question what you think and whether you need to make adjustments.
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15:00 Jonathan Cohen? Jim, where did you start on the spectrum of materialist to non-materialist when you got into this work?
15:10 Speaker 01 I would say my spiritual sense was sort of quiescent as an adult. I had gone to church so forth growing up. As an adult, I was, I would say, open-minded, really. So I didn't reject the idea of consciousness or spirituality. But at the same time, it was just sort of in the background. And then when my wife and I got together, she was much more open to such things and opened me up in many, many ways. But including really examining, is there more to reality than just what we see here in our day-to-day lives? And in particular, this question of consciousness and surviving after death.
15:54 Speaker 01 So when we saw that Ian Stevenson's research group was starting a new study, Echelon Near Death Experiences, at my wife's suggestion, I called them up to see if they needed help interviewing patients. Again, not because I was convinced one way or the other, but because I wanted to sort out for myself, is something going on here? And so I did a little work on near-death experiences. But then, as Ian Stevenson entered his 80s and did not have anyone to carry on the work at the university, that was sort of a slot for me. So then I, initially, I was just volunteering an hour or two.
16:35 Speaker 01 But eventually, I shut down my private practice and/or left my private practice and joined the UVA faculty, again, being a child psychiatrist, but also continuing to explore, again, for myself, is there something here? So I can't claim that I necessarily had great motivations to help the world, but more sorting out for myself whether there is good reason to think that we may continue on after death. And, you know, if people, when people have heard the work, and sometimes hopefully, I think it does help them.
17:17 Speaker 01 But it's also continues to be an intellectual exercise for me of trying to sort this out.
17:23 Jonathan Cohen? Because I like movies and I used to write them, I like to go into like the moment where the character sort of has this realization. Was there a moment where you were like living your life and kind of curious, but not overly religious or spiritual and this idea introduced itself to you? Like, was there that moment where there was sort of a push or pull, which you then obviously pursued and became more curious about?
17:50 Speaker 01 No, I mean, I think it was more of a gradual process, again with my wife. Now, as far as a single moment that convinced me, okay, there, this is worth something, that something is going on here. There's a well-known American case, James Leininger, who is thought to be World War II pilot, returned. And with that one, you know, we hear about a lot of cases and sometimes they sound really intriguing, but then when you get into the details, you see kind of the weaknesses of the case or things that don't quite fit. The more I explored that one, that's where the stronger it got because I realized we had a lot of documentation
18:34 Speaker 01 of what he had said before anyone had any idea if there was such a pilot that he was describing and then-
18:41 Mayim Bialik? Can you describe the case for people who may not be familiar?
18:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course. So, James Leininger is a little boy who was the son of a Christian couple in Louisiana, who, when he was, around the time of his second birthday, started having horrific nightmares multiple times a week, in which he would be kicking his legs up in the air and screaming, "Airplane crash on fire, little man can't get out." And then during the day, he would take his little toy airplanes and repeatedly say, "Airplane crash on fire," and bam, slam them into the family's coffee table. And I have a picture of it. There are dozens of scratches and dents from airplane crash on fire. He looked like a traumatized kid.
19:27 Mayim Bialik? Well, hold on, hold on one second, though. But, and I want you to sort of talk us through this. Many kids- Have nightmares. Many kids will then recreate their nightmares in their play as a sort of way to try and figure it out. Many kids say, many create, I mean, my kids barely spoke it too. So the whole thing is shocking that a two-year-old is having such, you know, but, but what is, like, what happens next when, when this child presents with this?
19:51 Speaker 01 Well, right. If, if it's just that, then we don't make anything of it. What happened next was that his parents were able to talk to him about this material several times while he was awake. And what he said was that he had, the Japanese had shot down his plane, that his plane was a Corsair, which I'd never heard of, but it's a type of plane developed during World War II. And that he flew off of a boat. And his parents asked him the name of the boat, and he said, "Natoma," which seems like kind of a strange name for a US aircraft carrier.
20:32 Speaker 01 But after that conversation, his father did an online search, and this was back in 2000. So it, it took him a while to find anything. But he eventually found information about the USS Natoma Bay, which in fact was stationed in the Pacific during World War II.
20:50 Mayim Bialik? Wow.
20:51 Speaker 01 They would also ask him who he was, and he would just say, "Me," or "James." And then one time they asked him who else was there, and he said, "Jack Larson." So this was all when he was two. And then when he was two and a half, his father had gotten a book on Iwo Jima to give to his own father, James's grandfather. And James came and got in his lap as he was looking through it one day, and they came to a picture, an aerial view of Iwo Jima. And James pointed it and said, "That's where my airplane got shot down."
21:29 Mayim Bialik? I can't, I'm freaking, I got chills up the back of my neck already.
21:32 Speaker 01 Well, so did his father, that his two-and-a-half-year-old was saying, "My airplane got shot down there, Daddy." So then it turned out that in fact, the USS Natoma Bay did take part in the Iwo Jima operation.
21:49 Speaker 01 So eventually with all this going on, his parents began to wonder, is this kid remembering a past life? Even though his father in particular was really opposed to the idea of past lives and reincarnation. But before James started saying these things, in fact, he started looking into it to prove to his wife that there's nothing to it. But eventually became persuaded that there was. So when James was four, his dad went to a Natomo Bay reunion. And he learned a couple of things. One, that there was in fact Jack Larson who had been on the ship. So he went and he had been looking for Jack Larson's among the war dead, but this Jack
22:33 Speaker 01 Larson had survived the war and was actually still alive. So he went and met him and learned that in fact he was on the ship during the time of the Iwo Jima operation. Because of course with these ships, there are groups rotating on and off. And then he had also learned that there was one and only one pilot from the Natomo Bay who was killed during the Iwo Jima operation. This was a young man from Philadelphia named James Houston. Which meant if James Lineker was recalling a past life, it had to be Houston's life. And what we see, one thing is James would always sign his pictures of planes and battle scenes, which he drew scores of, as James III and said, I'm the third James.
23:16 Speaker 01 Well, James Houston was James Junior, which would make James Lineker the third James. James said how he had been shot down by the Japanese, which Houston was. He said that he was flying a Corsair. Houston was actually flying a different plane when he was killed, but he was part of the squadron that tested the Corsair for the Navy. James said that his plane got hit in the engine and then crashed in the water. And eyewitnesses reported that Houston's plane was hit dead on right in the
23:55 Speaker 01 Right in the motor. James had nightmares of where he crashed in the water and quickly sank, which is what Houston's plane did. James had said how Jack Larson was there, and Jack Larson was the name of the pilot next to Houston on the day that he was killed. Not only is that a lot of details that have been verified, but they're very specific details, actual names. And all the things that I just told you are ones that we have records of that were made before Houston was identified, before anyone knew, anyone around, James Lineker knew if there even was such a pilot.
24:33 Speaker 01 And this sort of aha moment for me, which I should have figured out earlier, was that ABC News did, made this special about extraordinary events that actually never aired, but it included a segment on past life memories and had an interview with James's parents. This was before Houston was identified. And they also interviewed me for it, so they sent me a copy even though it never aired. So it eventually dawned on me, that's evidence of what James had said before Houston was
25:11 Speaker 01 identified, and include things like his mom saying that one day James said, "Mama, my plane was shot in the engine and crashed in the water, and that's how I died." And there was also talk of Iwo Jima and other things. So when I saw that all of that was documented, I still have not heard a decent explanation that explains away this case. There was a critic, a skeptic, who wrote a 90-some-page article about it, where he'd done a lot of work on it, but his piece didn't amount to anything.
25:51 Speaker 01 He still couldn't challenge the basics of this case, which is that James Lineker with no way of knowing about this one pilot of thousands or hundreds of thousands that were killed in the war, no way that he could have known the details about this guy, and yet everything that we have documented that James said, all those things were accurate for James Houston.
26:15 Mayim Bialik? Alright, so I have a couple, a couple things that I want to sort of address. So, and, and I did not bring you here to prove that you're wrong. I like, I don't want you to feel like I'm attacking you from that perspective. No, no, no, but that's not, there's, there's a couple things that one has to set aside if you're gonna have a reasonable kind of thought experiment about this. The first is that some people would say like, "Everyone's lying." Meaning, "All the eyewitnesses who confirmed it, they, it was misremembered, it was inappropriately cataloged," you know, so, and I'm sure there, there are statistical analyses you can do,
26:57 Mayim Bialik? for the number of things that would have to be misreported in order to have, you know, a series of details be not considered significant. But some people might say that. Some people might say, "Just because the eyewitness said that the plane was hit in the engine or the motor, doesn't mean that it was." And this is where Jonathan and I kind of come up against some of the challenges that I and many have with the telepathy tapes. If you have someone say that something happened, that doesn't mean that it happened. It means that someone said that it happened. But your job in this kind of analysis is to, to try and understand it from all these different perspectives. So I'm gonna set that aside. I'm gonna set aside people who are just like, "All the eyewitnesses are lying, and it's just a bunch of hooey, blah blah."
27:42 Mayim Bialik? So let's just set that aside.
27:44 Speaker 01 Well, can I address that first?
27:46 Mayim Bialik? Oh, if you'd like, I mean, I don't, I don't give that, personally, I don't give that line of thinking much credence, because I find it very unscientific. Meaning if you're presented with a certain amount of information that, that seems to be statistically significant, it is your responsibility to investigate it and not simply discard it. But I'm happy for you to speak to that as well, if you'd like to.
28:06 Speaker 01 Right, so that's why documentation becomes so important. So, and this was James's dad that did the vast bulk of this work. There are military records that document Houston's crash. And, um, and yes, there is the one thing with the eyewitnesses, but most of it is, uh, well, I mean, they were eyewitnesses back 1942 or whenever it was, but, um, you know, it's not people making up stuff now to fit with what they find out happened to the pilot. It is stuff that was documented decades ago, and we've also got documentation of James's father searching for things and like searching for Jack Larson and, and, you know, I mean,
28:51 Speaker 01 writing people trying to find out about this guy. So the paper trail for this one is quite impressive.
29:00 Mayim Bialik? The, the next thing that I'd like to also set aside is the notion that, and, and again, I don't believe this, but his parents could be making all of this up. And I'm sure you've had to deal with this literally for decades. What if either the child had, I'm just going to make this up, the child had access to things that his father found interesting and his father in reality loved to research things about World War II and had told this story. It somehow got into the child's head and the child has an exceptional mind, which indeed it would be an exceptional mind to hold all this kind of information. But we, we also have people who would say just because the father says, or just because he documented
29:45 Mayim Bialik? this, doesn't mean that he was not orchestrating this or that any of these parents were orchestrating it. So I'd like to bring that up and have you speak to that because I think it is a legitimate concern that in many cases, parents may even mindlessly or not necessarily consciously be inserting things or forgetting that they're inserting things in the case of facilitated communication and some of the conversations around the telepathy tapes, for example. Parents, the whole point of making unconscious gestures or sounds is that you don't know you're making them. And if someone says, "We can detect that you're making unconscious to you, you know,
30:25 Mayim Bialik? but perceptible indications," I mean, it's the horse counting, right? The whole point of unconscious things is that they're not conscious of the person experiencing them. Can you speak a little bit to what might be happening with people who say, like, "The parents are just making this up"? How do you verify that they're not?
30:42 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, I mean, James Houston, again, was, it's not like there have been things written about this guy. I mean, it's, but beyond that, when they did this ABC News interview, if they were going to orchestrate this whole thing, that was their golden opportunity to say, "We've discovered that he was remembering this one pilot's life." But they didn't have that information then, so they didn't say that. So they gave the details that James was giving, but they didn't know if it could be verified. And in fact, we've got email exchanges between James's dad and one of the producers saying,
31:24 Speaker 01 "Keep looking for this James, Jack Larson, that sounds like a good lead," and all these things, that then ultimately proved to match for Houston's life, but at the time were unknowns. So the so-called stranger cases, where no one in the kid's life knew about this person, those are the ones that are the most impressive.
31:50 Mayim Bialik? I want you also to, to kind of speak a little bit to the framework of why we can study, for example, case studies, and your book from 2015 is in particular some very special, you know, studies, or case studies. Jeffrey Kreipel is a friend of the podcast and a friend of ours, and
32:12 Mayim Bialik? You know, when I read his book, which, you know, kind of talks about thinking impossibly, it kind of presents from, you know, for lack of a better explanation, from the social science perspective and from the humanities perspective, the importance and the significance of valuing every single human's experience, even if it doesn't fit into a scientific paradigm, even if it doesn't fit into a materialistic paradigm. What I'm interested in with you in particular is you've had this incredible career exploring from a completely scientific perspective, meaning from a materialist framework.
32:53 Mayim Bialik? You've been able to explore things that in many cases defy even the most basic tenets of what is required to examine something scientifically. Meaning, when we think of the scientific method, when we think of the reproducibility and the efficacy of being able to recreate things in a laboratory setting and remove things from their natural environment to recreate them in order to provide what many people say is proof, right? If this person's telepathic, I want you to prove it six ways to Sunday in every laboratory, remove them from everything that's comfortable to them, and you have to prove it, and that's the only way that we know that it's true.
33:35 Mayim Bialik? But what Jeffrey Kriebel introduces, and I think what your work is elaborating on, in an even for me more meaningful way, is a case study, even if it's one, that has so many elements that are compelling and that require further investigation, deserves to be treated as legitimate and investigated as such. Can you speak to some of the challenges of working with individual cases and what we are able to say, or what we can extrapolate based on even one case study, and why you believe that that's valid?
34:12 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, this is not controlled laboratory science. And, you know, when you're studying spontaneous events, you have to accept that there can be limitations. So we are not, we've not been trying to prove anything. What we've been exploring is, is there evidence? So with science typically, proof is not even the goal. And Ian Stevenson, I'm sure he's quoting other people, but he said, "Proof should only be used in mathematics." Because again, it's about accumulating evidence enough where eventually it gets accepted. It's different from, and even controlled laboratory science, you're not proving anything. What you're showing is that it's beyond statistical significance,
34:56 Speaker 01 that, you know, there's something there. Now, as far as coming from a scientific point of view, I would challenge your idea that that means it has to be from a materialistic point of view. Again, when you're in the real world, not a perfectly controlled world, yes, there are some limitations that you have to accept. So you think, okay, well, one case doesn't prove much, doesn't provide much evidence. If the case is compelling enough, it does require an explanation. So with these cases, you add James Langer on to the other 2,200 cases we've investigated. And needless to say, they're not all as strong as his are.
35:41 Speaker 01 But if you look at the cases, this work as a group, then I think the evidence does become impressive. And I mean, we can do statistics looking at various aspects of it. But as far as coming down to, okay, was, is he reincarnated or not? As a whole, I think you can reasonably conclude, yeah, I think so. So because more preponderance of the evidence, perhaps instead of beyond the shadow of a doubt. But I think good case can be made that preponderance of the evidence would lead you to conclude that some young children do have memories of a life in the past.
36:20 Mayim Bialik? To me, this is the closest that many of us have come to, you know, having an actual understanding of consciousness existing outside of, right, the current consciousness that we have perception of. What would it even mean to say that there is life after death?
36:41 Speaker 01 Well, what I think it means is that there is a consciousness realm that interacts with the physical reality, but is also apart from it. So that when a person's physical body dies, the consciousness aspect might live on in a different way. Not to get into it too much, but I think a strong case can be made and has been made that reality, that consciousness is what is fundamental and that physical matter is actually derived from consciousness.
37:22 Speaker 01 But that ultimately, reality at its core grows out of consciousness.
37:28 Mayim Bialik? This is an enormous statement. So the notion is, I'm just like, I want you to walk us through it. The notion is that we have a consciousness and we identify as the person that's in this physical body. The only kind of way to understand these cases would be to say that there is some way that certain individuals, young children, are accessing someone else's consciousness from a different time?
38:06 Speaker 01 On the face of it, the simplest explanation is that someone remembers a past life because they led the past life. But yes, there are certainly other possibilities to consider, even if you accept the cases. And, you know, if there is this realm of consciousness, I mean, it's almost certainly not linear. And, you know, so, I mean, we try to put everything in sort of a framework we can understand, but I suspect it's beyond our understanding. You know, you could look at the idea, okay, rather than this person continuing, this individual continuing on and then having a new life, like you're saying, is it that somehow the information...
38:51 Speaker 01 Continued, but then wasn't alive, so to speak. So it didn't survive, but it kind of continued and then it got picked up somehow by a young child.
39:06 Speaker 01 You know, it's worth exploring the idea at least. And then there are also the idea of so-called Akashic Records.
39:14 Mayim Bialik? I was, okay, you just pulled it out of my head because I was like, this, this exists, right? For thousands of years, people have talked about this. And there are many people who believe that they can dip into other realms of consciousness. And for the most part, they are ridiculed, dismissed, you know, they have communities where they, you know, congregate together. But this is not something that we talk about, right? And here we are, talking about it.
39:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I bring it up as one example of things to consider. But yeah, the idea of the Akashic Records is that there's this infinite database of everything that's ever happened and everyone that's ever lived and so forth, and that people can, you know, pull up a file or a file opens up and then people can incorporate it and then either know about the past or believe they lived in the past. Now, again, that concept, I'm not here to promote it by any means, but the idea that this realm of consciousness would include, again, material that's not necessarily surviving, but simply exists, you know, is something worth thinking about.
40:25 Mayim Bialik? This is not one kid in the middle of Louisiana in, in, in recent decades. For a tremendous amount of recorded history, this has been something that has been talked about, but you in particular are sort of privy to.
40:44 Mayim Bialik? Over 2,000 cases. And there's a sort of systematic process by which you you kind of tackle these, right? And try and see, is there something here? One of the things that keeps coming up, and I just can't, I can't get my head around this. What is up with the birthmarks and the birth defects?
41:06 Speaker 01 So Ian Stevenson was, before he got into all this and had quite a successful mainstream career, much of it was in psychosomatic medicine, so the the interface between mind and body. So with these cases, he was got really intrigued by them. And it's where the kids, not only did they talk about past life memories, but they were born with birthmarks or even full birth defects that match wounds, usually the fatal wounds on the body of the previous person. And, I mean, I confess, when I first got into this work, that seemed almost like a bridge too far for me.
41:47 Speaker 01 I mean, how would a wound on a body then show up, you know, and affect someone, even if they were reincarnated? What I have come to conceptualize, and what Ian conceptualized, was that it's not so much the literal physical wound on the body, but more of how that affects the consciousness. So, for instance, if you're getting your fingers chopped off as you're being murdered, that affects the consciousness, and then, in the case I'm talking about, then leads to similar impact on the developing fetus and leads to deformed fingers when the child is born.
42:31 Speaker 01 And, you know, there is good evidence that at times mental images can produce very specific effects on the body. And we all know that stuff in the mind can have general effects on the body. So, you know, when you're nervous and your heart starts beating fast, I mean, you know, things, there's obviously a connection there. But at times, it can be very specific. And the idea Would be if you've got someone who is sensitive enough that the they carry that trauma with them or that image with them onto a developing fetus, which then makes it develop something similar.
43:13 Speaker 01 So, you know, there's sort of a logic to it and certainly, I mean, Ian approached those cases with the same
43:21 Speaker 01 careful approach that he used with the other cases where when he learned about a case, he tried to find, first of all, get an autopsy report of the previous person.
43:31 Speaker 01 And in the Asian cases, those were often not available, but then talking to as many witnesses as he could who saw the body to determine, does this kid's birthmark or birth defect actually match what the previous person went through?
43:46 Jonathan Cohen? This part of the story would negate the idea that they're simply remembering or they're accessing an experience that wasn't their own. This would indicate that they actually did live through it.
43:59 Speaker 01 I mean, it certainly gets harder to explain how a, you know, download of information would then produce a birth defect. Now, I'm not saying you couldn't twist it and make it, squeeze it in there, but yes, I mean, that, that, that becomes less persuasive.
44:16 Jonathan Cohen? Although, just to steel man that argument, if they did download it and they experienced it that viscerally and they, you know, read it and they have an active imagination, I'm just playing with what the consciousness could be doing, then potentially it, it forms, but it's a, it's a harder case to make.
44:36 Speaker 01 Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, you have to think, okay, if in the future, someone was able to take all of your memories and implant them in my mind, did I experience them or is it just that it feels like I experienced them? I mean, I don't know.
44:55 Speaker 01 So, yes, I, I agree with exactly what you say. It becomes less plausible if, if you accept these birthmark cases.
45:03 Speaker 01 But not to say it's impossible.
45:06 Jonathan Cohen? Is anyone net new here? Or are we all just recycled consciousness? Because there are more and more people. So you would think that wherever consciousness comes from, there has to be people who have not had all these previous lives in order to justify all the population of the Earth.
45:23 Speaker 01 Yes, many people have asked about that. So years ago now, a professor at Johns Hopkins did the statistics on it. And in fact, so if you look at how many people have lived in the past, you have to make some estimates, obviously. There have been far more people who have lived in the past than are alive in the present. Now, the interval between lives would have to be growing smaller for us all to squeeze in. But some people have thought that population growth makes reincarnation impossible, and that's simply not true. On the other hand, I actually agree with you that
46:06 Speaker 01 who's to say there aren't new souls coming into existence? I mean, it may be that they are sort of eternal and suffer from spacetime and, you know, have always been here and always will be. But we don't know that. And it may be new ones bubbling up all the time.
46:25 Jonathan Cohen? Or they come from some other system, enter our database. There may be multiple Akashic records. The Akashic records that are spoken about in our religious lineage may just be the library on the block. And there could be other blocks with other libraries, and there could be book exchanges. We don't know.
46:44 Speaker 01 Yes, I mean, I actually think that, you know, if this is a reality that grew out of consciousness, why would there not be other realities that have grown out of consciousness? So it may be, I actually personally, this is just a belief. But my personal belief is that reincarnation, if it occurs, it doesn't occur necessarily to everyone. That while I think, I think there is reasonable evidence to say that a part of us can survive death, we may then have completely other experiences that in other universes or other realities, and not all come back here.
47:24 Mayim Bialik? I think you estimated about 70% of these cases. The people that they are... Channeling, embodying, remembering, died from an unnatural cause and in many cases, a traumatic one. And this is something that, that we talk about a lot, and it did come up in our conversation about the telepathy tapes, which is not to say that nonverbal autistic children have trauma, but, once you're dealing with a system that is operating differently, either because of, let's say, being a nonverbal autistic child, or having a traumatic experience, a near-death experience, it's possible that, and we talked about this
48:06 Mayim Bialik? with Scott Barry Kaufman, it is possible to imagine that there is some sort of differential susceptibility to really being in touch with certain parts of ourselves and possibly other realms. So, you know, when I was in grad school for neuroscience, you know, there was discussion at that time of, you know, is, can we find God in the brain? You know, what does the brain look like of someone who is more likely to believe in God? Like, what is the thing that makes people want to believe, right? And this is a conversation we can have, you know, in a religious framework, but, we can also have it in this kind of framework to say, if everyone's brain is different, you know, by and large, we're
48:51 Mayim Bialik? the same, but everybody's a little bit different, is it possible that a situation where death involved some sort of trauma is, is more easily accessible to those who have extra-perceptual capabilities? So I've worked with many, many energy healers who can pick up on things, indeed, that seem to be from another realm, or they will know, simply by looking at me from across the room, where there is dis-ease in my body, right? This is something that energy workers tap into. They're trained to, to read. Different aspects of a person. Can you talk a little bit about this link between traumatic death?
49:35 Mayim Bialik? And then also kind of a heightened perceptive ability that might be able to access that easier?
49:42 Speaker 01 Yes, you're right. Seventy percent die by unnatural means, murder, suicide, combat, accident, things like that, which is way more than you would expect in the general population. And even the ones who die of natural death, they tend to be young. So a quarter of them are under the age of 15. So it seems that this sort of a life ending too early either increases the chances that a child will later talk about that life.
50:12 Mayim Bialik? Wow.
50:13 Speaker 01 And it may be that those kinds of factors lead the consciousness to sort of stay near this realm and then come back. So it, again, I mean, there are exceptions to everything. There are the natural deaths, but there may be particular factors that either lead intact memories to come through or lead the individual to come back to this life, you know, this world at all.
50:49 Speaker 01 We're actually, our group is starting to try to look to ways to explore some of what you're mentioning. So we are gonna look into certain testing. So for instance, people with PTSD, there are some tests where they show particular patterns or tendencies. Well, is this phenomenon like PTSD? Is it a post-traumatic kind of thing? So the plan is to then do the same kind of testing with some of these people and see if they get, show the same tendencies as people with PTSD.
51:28 Speaker 01 Another kind of thing to look at, there are people who have incredible personal memories. So, you know, you may have heard about it, but you can say, "What were you doing on March 4th, 1971?" And they can tell you. So, those people, if you look at testing how they perform, could you get similar results? But these kids showing, okay, so maybe it's not a traumatic thing, but maybe it's just exceptional memory that even carries over into past life. So just trying to sort it all out.
52:01 Mayim Bialik? Like, "My memory is so good. I can't only tell you what I had for breakfast, or what I did last year, but I can remember the consciousness that I can access from seven generations ago. I've got a really good memory."
52:15 Speaker 01 Right, right. A really good memory.
52:18 Mayim Bialik? We're gonna pause here. There is so much more to this incredible conversation with Dr. Tucker, and so many more fascinating revelations in Part 2. So please, make sure you subscribe, stay tuned, and do not miss Part 2 of our conversation with Dr. Jim Tucker. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.
Previous Part Two: Dr. William Li on The Foods You Must Add to Your Diet to Heal Your Body, Stop Inflammation and Prevent Cancer Next Part Two: Scientific Evidence of Past Lives, The Patterns in Famous Past Life Cases & How You Live Now Affects Your Afterlife with Dr. Jim Tucker Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated