REINCARNATION!

For most people, reincarnation is a matter of faith. Millions of Hindus believe in it, and some polls show that over 20% of Americans who self-identify as Christians do too, despite Christian doctrine's repudiation of the idea.

What fewer people know is that reincarnation is actually being studied scientifically. The research falls into three categories:

1. Children's Claims of Past Life Memories
Some feel that persuasive evidence for reincarnation is found in the work of psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson, who recently retired from his post in the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia. Stevenson spent four decades traveling the globe, following up on thousands of cases of very young children who reported intricate memories of past lives. According to Stevenson's documentation, these children spontaneously recalled names, locations, and intimate details of people they could not possibly know.

Sample case: A five-year-old Indian boy, Parmod Sharma, remembered specific details about a man named Parmanand, including street directions in Parmanand's city and the man's "special seat." The boy also visited the factory Parmanand owned and gave directions for repairing complicated machinery in it. Read his story.

Proponents say: Stevenson's work follows the scientific method; his controlled studies rule out connections between the child's family and the "past life" family. In 1975, in a review of Stevenson's "Cases of the Reincarnation Type" in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Lester S. King concluded that Stevenson had "painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases in India, cases in which the evidence for reincarnation is difficult to understand on any other grounds....[H]e has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored."

Skeptics say: Most of Stevenson's cases occurred in countries where a belief in reincarnation is a cultural given, such as Thailand or India. In such cultures, children might be predisposed to make up stories about past lives--stories that are then positively reinforced or conditioned by family members. Stevenson himself says his studies are merely "suggestive" of reincarnation and declines to state positively whether reincarnation is real.