Otherworld - Interview with Dr. Philip Cozzolino of DOPS

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Interview with Philip Cozzolino of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. Philip talks about his work studying children with past life memories, near-death experiences, and he discusses some of the most impactful cases he has come across during his years with DOPS. To hear bonus episodes and videos of Otherworld, sign up for the Otherworld Patreon Check out our Merch Follow us on: Instagram, TikTok, Twitter For business inquiries contact: [e-mail] If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your story at [e-mail] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This week, I'm interviewing another researcher from University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, also known as DAPS. DAPS is a research unit within the UVA School of Medicine that rigorously investigates and studies extraordinary experiences of the human consciousness and the mind. Many of you probably heard my interview with Dr. Kim Penberthee a while back. This week, I will be speaking to Dr. Philip Cozalino. Philip works closely with DOPS's director, Dr. Jim Tucker, researching children with past life memories. Philip's work has been mostly focused on finding trends in a database of 22,000-plus cases

of this type and designing studies that explore potential mechanisms for these memories. He also studies out-of-body and near-death experiences. These topics, as you can imagine, are very exciting to. me. As you know, they've come up on the show before. And it's one thing to just hear a single story here and there, but the idea of having a database containing thousands of similar cases just like these and the ability to go through that database and actually study it is amazing. I had so much fun talking to Philip. Thank you again to the team at Dops for making this happen. This is my conversation with Dr. Philip Casalino.

and you're listening to Otherworld. Is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science, you can't argue. It's not only. All of a sudden. Up in the sky. It's almost frustrating that it's happening.

I'm going to die. I'm going to die. It's limbs were just like wrong. Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them ahead. All right. I am joined right now by Philip Cazolino. He is an associate professor of research

at University of Virginia's Division of perceptual studies, aka. Dops, welcome to the show, Philip. Thanks for having me, Jack. First of all, I'd like to start out by just asking, like, what is your background? How did you get into all of this in the first place? Or what did you originally set out to study when you began your career in science? So I went to the University of Minnesota to get my PhD in psychology, in particular in social psychology. And while there, I discovered this theory that had been published first and around the

mid-80s called Terror Management Theory. It's this theory about how human beings are affected by the fact that we know we die. And a long story short, the theory is pretty pessimistic that basically a lot of the bad things that affect humans at an individual level, socially, so intergroup conflict. They link it to basically we're afraid of death, and how we deal with that is it sort of manifests in a lot of bad outcomes. And it was fascinating, and it still is, and I love the theory. But I had been, at that time, reading a lot of reports from near-death experiencers,

people who had died or perhaps died clinically or not, et cetera, and told these stories of, you know, in a sense, consciousness, leaving the body and then returning. And what you take away from, when you read those in bulk, as I did, you see very different reactions than what that theory predicted from people. It didn't predict for these individuals bad outcomes. It was challenging for them, and at times it took a while to get over the pain and the hurt of it all.

But over time, they became much happier people. they became much more motivated to pursue intrinsic interest as opposed to just being told what to do, either by society or family, whatever. So it was like from a psychological perspective, it was really interesting because here are people who weren't just thinking about the fact that they're going to die. They think they actually did die. And it led to these very positive outcomes. And I wanted to do something with that. I wanted to add to the psychological literature, but I didn't want to just lean into forum posts. You know, people, oh, I saw something on the Internet that said that, you know,

You know, as a scientist, you know, I was a grad student at that time. I certainly wasn't capable of making that big a lead. And I came across in scientific medical journals work published by my now colleague, Dr. Bruce Grayson, one of the leading names in the study of near-death experiences, and suddenly paper after paper that I could just saw that he was publishing in the scientific peer-reviewed journals, that gave me, in a sense, the ability to link my idea to, something with a bit more gravitas than just some people reported this on the internet. And so that was 24 years ago that I put out my first paper on my idea.

Unfortunately, I got some traction and I had some success there. So even though I was a mainstream psychologist in a mainstream psychology department and publishing in mainstream scientific journals, I started working with an idea that was already a little bit on the fringe and just sort of incorporating it basically saying, we can learn from these experiencers and maybe we don't have to have a near-death experience to come to terms in a healthy way with our mortality. And now here it is, you know, 20-some years later. And he's a colleague and I'm working at Dops with him.

And I'm actually on a paper with him, two papers already. So it's just, it's full circle for me. And it's just been really a fun ride to get here. Oh, so you kind of dove in headfirst into the strange, so to speak. Yeah. I mean, I guess so. I mean, it's funny. I think about it now. I mean, it's not that strange, honestly.

Well, at the time, to be clear, though, at that time, and this isn't me saying, like, oh, I was a pioneer. But I think my reticence was I was a grad student when I published my first paper and had this idea. So you're ready, kind of like, uh-oh, will anyone take this seriously? But no one in social psychology, experimental psychology was talking about near-death experiences and what we can learn from them. So it really was a bit of, I guess, now at the time, I was kind of younger and I just didn't care and I thought this is so cool. This could work in the lab and I could do this. And now I look back and I think, oh my God, Philip, what did you do? He took a pretty big leap, as you said.

But mostly it's been well received. People are still using my work and generating their own work from it, which is really exciting. And as I say, for me at a personal level to now just be at Dops working with Bruce and to be collaborating with him is just a great professional sort of full circle. What do you think people don't realize, like the average person doesn't realize about the study of this type of stuff, like the paranormal, scientifically. Like, I think my sense is that a lot of people who don't think about this stuff too much use science as an excuse to not believe in it and to write it off. I think there's like an assumption that this stuff has been studied and already disproved, right? Like otherwise we would believe in it.

What is, what do you think is the reality of that? I think that, well, there are a couple different camps. We definitely know and we hear, and in fact a colleague of mine just received a rejection from a paper from a science peer review journal, where one of the reviewers basically just wrote five words, and it was, this is pseudos, science and nonsense. And so there are, there's definitely a camp of people who feel that it's, it's, it's, the questions we're asking are unanswerable using a scientific approach. And I think that to me is a testable question. I still, I don't think you should be making that decision a priori to use the science term, right? You shouldn't just assume something can't be tested before you actually test it. There is a lot of discounting.

as you say, there is published evidence for at least suggestive of, and there is in areas, whether it's near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences or after-death communications, to the extent that people have done the work that we do adopt, there are papers that have been peer-reviewed with a rigorous approach to trying to make sense of what's happening. And anyway, we approach it from whatever we learn, we learn. And yet they definitely seem to discount it. And a quick story, just very quick. Apologize for the monologue.

There is a well-known social psychologist named Daryl Bem. And a few years back, and he's published, he was a legend in social psychology, did a lot of work with his wife as well. They published together on gender identity and all these kinds of things in psychology. But he had a sort of separate life as a researcher publishing. papers in parapsychology. And no one that I knew ever talked about it seemingly even knew about it. At some point later in his career, I was already at my Department of Psychology at the University of Essex in England, so this was in the 2000s.

He published a paper in the top-tier experimental journal for social psychologists, the Journal of JPSP, internal personality and social psychology, top tier, mainstream as it gets in our field. And it was all about PSI, right? So sort of pre-cognitive evidence, perhaps, that someone could have know something before they should know it. The field blew up and called him a pseudoscientist, called the journal out for publishing it, even though he did everything right. And the long, you know, the end of my story is, is what they did is rather than look at the work generally, I'm obviously generalizing here, the first thing that people said is if this is the process that we're using, if it can lead to this paper, we need to change the process because it clearly is flawed. So instead of actually

looking at the work and learning from it and challenging it on your own and designing your own studies to make it better to refine it, to prove or refute, whatever, they simply said, we need to tear it down. We need to tear the way we do this down because clearly it should not have allowed this to be published. And to me, that is really indicative of some broader problem in science, is that it doesn't matter who the person is, it doesn't matter how good the work is, if it challenges their sort of cosmology as a researcher, as a scientist, they will not take it seriously and in fact will try to create situations to make it much more difficult to do that work. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I think, especially with what we're about to talk

about today, past life memories and near-death experiences, stuff like that, I'd say especially with near-death experiences, it's silly to reject because it's like, this stuff is there, it's happening, that's real, so why is it happening, right? Like, I'm personally fine, with, you know, if we found answers to some of the big paranormal questions, if they were boring explanations, I'd be fine with that. I think I just want to know why. I think it's funny when people don't know why, and there's so many of these big mysteries through history, weird phenomena where they'll give it a name based kind of on nothing and then move on. Like, that's pseudoscience to me when they're just like, oh, it's, um, these people are a new type of psychopath that we don't understand.

Exactly. Yeah, and then we'll give it a name. We don't know why it happens, but let's move on. Yeah, science is filled with people who knew exactly what they were talking about. And years later, we're proven to be completely wrong. It's, right? And they just sort of, at the moment that they're doing it, they've forgotten all of that history. and they're just, they lock into what they know must be true or not true,

and that is just not scientific thinking. I mean, it's small our religious thinking. It's just, it's no different, it's dogmatic in the same way, as this is what I know or don't know, and you can't convince me either way, and if you do get somehow through the system, the system's flawed. Yeah, I think, I'd like to challenge skeptics to the same standards that they, you know, want paranormal proof to contain

which is like being able to be replicated. Like I hear all sorts of explanations all the time about ghosts. People actually throw them out really confidently. Like, oh, it's, well, you know it's black mold, right? Like, you know it's black mold. Really? Like, how? Black mold in my house?

It just made me sneeze. There's like, I've never seen this stuff replicated. Like, if we can make mold have a chair fly across the room or like see people levitating like let me know because we can make a really

really cheap haunted house and make a lot of money together if we could make black mold do that you just create EVPs on a recorder somehow with the mold in your house yeah I'm not sure how that would work or like infrasound there's some people who think like like low vibration sounds can make

you know the brain do something and you see a ghost, right? Like, if we could do that, I mean, that's a great special effect for a concert. Like, let's make it happen. That'd be amazing. But I've not seen anybody be able to replicate any of those theories. So I don't know. I guess now I'm rambling a little bit, but my point is that this stuff is out there.

And I'm just, I'm happy that people are trying to find out why it happens because I can't think of an evolutionary reason why we would have near-death experiences. I'm so glad you said that because in fact, that's one of, wonderful, Jack, thank you so much for bringing that point up. Seriously, I'm not trying to be like, I just, no one ever says that, and I've been using that point. I've been using that point for so, now, unfortunately, I never needed to justify it in my papers because I wasn't studying near-death experiences. I was, in a sense, translating from that literature to look. We can learn from it in our daily lives. But in conversations with people who were pushing back on the idea, I would often say, just explain to me evolutionarily

how that has come to be. Like, where seeing the light and going through what in the West we perceive as a tunnel and how, why? Why would that? Now, I get perhaps, perhaps some kind of numbing, some kind of process that can help eliminate some pain. But there are so many culturally shared experiences of these near-death experiences that really, when you look at them, you think there is simply, in my mind, it's very difficult to come up with an explanation evolutionarily is how the brain has developed that for us to die. It just doesn't work that way. To me, it seems like evolution has put us into a mode of everything we can do to survive and to be fearful of everything that. brings us closer to death, except when we're dying, it's filled with all-encompassing love, and it's, where? How did that happen? Why would it have happened? Yeah, especially because

near-death experiences, a lot of the people who are having these, they're having them because of modern medical miracles, basically, technology that's new. So if it was a feature of our evolution, like you'd have to think these almost never happened before modern medicine until like really recently so how could we have even evolved when all these people were just dying I mean let's face it like a hundred years ago most people were just like wandering off into the woods on accident and like breaking a leg and dying when they're 28 or whatever you know um it's yeah it's funny back to your earlier point too is that you know my colleague bruce grayson who i mentioned earlier he has done some of this work trying to, people come up with, well, it's the drugs that they're giving in the hospital that must be causing these hallucinations. So, you know, that's one of those things we're like, well, they've come up with an answer and they're just discounting. It's akin to the black mold discussion. And here, he went out and did a study. And what he found was, in fact, in the cases where the drugs were administered to people, they were significantly less likely to have near-death experiences. And if they did, they were

significantly less impactful and meaningful and deep as the people who weren't on the drugs. So has that changed that person's or that particular CAMP's view of near-dithe experiences? My guess is they're just going to come up with another, well, it must be this. Similarly, many people have near-duty experiences, and they're not in hospitals. They're not administered drugs. I mean, so again, it's an answer to explain something that they want explained in a certain way that discounts the fact that you, even if you were right, you haven't accounted for a huge percentage of the cases that seem to exist because they were never given the drugs

in the first place. They were in the forest somewhere and they had one, whatever it might be. So, I don't know. At the end of the day, I think all we can do is approach it, as I've said before, non-dogmatically, with an open mind literally open to the point of if we find some absolute normal explanation, physicalist explanation that isn't about consciousness surviving, okay, well, then we'll find that, hopefully someday. Whatever the answer is, is what we're trying to get to it. So one more thing before we move on, you know, if this was something we evolved to do, like in most cases people die.

And if you didn't, like if this was something that was like learned as a survival trait or something, right? It would only be like a few people who survived. And like I guess that opens up the question of like how quickly could something be encoded into our DNA, right? Yeah, I mean, the answer to that is it doesn't, yeah, this is, this is, you know, this isn't something that like you, yeah, we don't take a pill and our DNA changes and our evolutionarily, you know, I mean, we're still stuck in all of the old lessons from evolution. I mean, that's why we have, we still are fearful of things that we shouldn't even be fearful of anymore. It's like, it's like we are, we are, this stuff is glacial, right? I mean, in, in the, in the terms of how. it impacts individuals. And as you said, it's the way that this would have developed would not have been just in a handful of people who've had these experiences relative to the population

in the globe and in mostly in the past 100 years. And now suddenly it's just that's what's happened. We've evolved to have this near-death experience part of our, you know, in our brain to make us think something good when we're dying. We're at that point, or if we've actually died. It's just, I don't know. I didn't mean to cut you off. If I did, I apologize for that. No, that's great. But yeah, to me, this is such a difficult question that I don't think enough people are asking about these kinds of experiences, especially near to the experiences. It makes no sense to me that we have developed an evolutionary process of getting us to feel as if we're going somewhere outside our body when we die, surrounded by love and dead family members.

It's like that just cannot have evolved. It doesn't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't want to be dogmatic. I guess it could have. I don't see how, from everything I know about evolutionary processes, I don't see why that would be the case. Okay. Here's a question for you that I don't know if your particular expertise will be able to answer fully, but I'm just curious if you know what are some of the things we know upon birth. And do we know how we know these things? Like, what are some things we biologically know?

What do we like I know for example They say that like babies know how to swim Or even just simply like we know how to breathe Like you don't have to teach somebody how to breathe Automatic processes Animals know how to I mean for instance Okay very dumb example

But I just I've never had a pet I got a cat named Merlin like a year and a half ago And I was amazed at how easy it is to Get a cat Like you just they're born, you just put a litter box there and they know how to use it. You put them in it once, I think, and that's it. Like, the next thing you know, they're like, oh, that's where I go.

You don't have to do anything to cats. You don't have to train them. Like, they just, you know, they might cough out a hairball sometimes, but they just, they know. And also, like, I remember buying him a lizard toy when he was really, really young. He didn't react to any toys, but as soon as he saw a fake lizard, like, I saw his personality change. So something, he knew what a lizard was. You know what I'm saying? Like, there are things in us, we call instincts, that we know already.

And I'm just curious, like, if you knew what are those things that humans know and how? Yeah, that's a good. It's a great question. I'm not a developmentalist. So I do know a little bit about when things develop in terms of like a sense of self, because that was sort of my area of expertise. And that's downstream. that's that's three years two to three years old you start seeing evidence and there are ways that

you can test that um i do know that like human beings we talk a little bit about this in my i've talked in my lectures about this in psychology is that one of the things that's interesting about human beings is how reliant we are on others as babies as young infants compared to as you say other animals i mean you know it's that classic story where you see maybe a horse being born or something like that. And then after like a second or two of it, trying to figure out how to work its knees, the next thing you know, it's running around the field with its mother. And it's like, how is that possible? It's like we are, as human beings, we are incredibly weak and incapable of feeding ourselves and doing all these basic things. But that doesn't necessarily mean,

as you say, like if there are water births and the babies can be fine with that, especially because they were, you know, water apparently in the womb. So I do know that they grasp and they like comfort and they want to, in a sense, snuggle. I don't know if that's the right word, nuzzle, that kind of thing. There are some basic things that they look for, warmth and comfort is something that they know and seek and want. That goes back to old studies in psychology, even dealing with monkeys. Baby monkeys showed that. That's Harlow's work for anyone listening.

So, yeah, again, I can only speak to what I know. I'm not a developmentalist. I do know that we definitely rely. That's how come we're so socially oriented. Why we're social animals is that we come into this world desperately needing others to help us into it. Got it. So I ask that as a bridge into the main thing we're going to be talking about today, which is past life memories. A very, very interesting one, which is exactly what it sounds like.

It's usually a kid that starts talking about their old life. Perhaps you could take it from here and explain more of these, but yeah, they're weird. It's very common. Yeah, it is weird. We're in the process of trying to figure out just how common it is. We're starting a new study here, a large scale with a probability sample and working with the people at the University of Virginia survey center to try to figure out just what is the prevalence of this, but we get more than 100, up to 120 contacts a year at DOPS from parents saying, we think something's happening based on what we discovered on your website, et cetera.

So what this is is we call them court cases, C-O-R-T. That comes from the original researcher into this, the person who founded what is now DOPS, Dr. Ian Stevenson, who's head of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and court, C-O-R-T stands for cases of the reincarnation type. So you can see in that title, even though the R word, as we sometimes call it in the building, is there, it's even in that title, it was Ian Stevenson being a very good scientist saying of the reincarnation type, right? He wasn't saying these are reincarnation cases. It was just the way he was able to come up with a term that made sense. And yeah, so what he discovered, this goes back more than 60 years, and this has been true in every continent that,

They've looked for cases. They've found them other than Antarctica. And what traditionally happens and what it almost always, but not, again, not 100%. But what it is is generally between the ages about two and a half to five in that range. Actually, the median age of first in our database at UVA, so more than 2,200 cases documented there, it's around two and three quarters to around two and three quarters of age a kid will start saying things out loud to its mother or its father saying things like when i was when i used to live in that country or i remember when i died in the fire or very often very true sort of difficult for parents

to hear those often say things like you're not my real mommy or you're not my first mommy or daddy and when eventually, you know, this all requires parents to sort of engage, right, because there must be probably some kids who say things like this, and the parents just aren't listening or just my kid's imagination. But eventually when parents start probing and, again, oftentimes this repeats and things happen over and over again, they start asking questions in more and more details will be shared by the child. And as I said, there are 2,254K.

in our database right now, spanning 60 plus years in multiple countries and cultures of this phenomenon, these children claiming, seeming to express memories that in many cases up towards 70% of them have actually been able to be linked to someone who used to live. Really? We call them solved cases. Sometimes it's identified. So if I use either of those terms, that's what it means. But 70% of our cases in the database are solved, meaning that the details from the children were so specific that the families and or the investigators were actually able to say, okay, this appears to be, we went to that other country or that other town or whatever it might be, and we found a person of that name who died in the way that the kids said that they did and had family members like they said they did, a wife, a child, whatever it might be.

And oftentimes what then happens, the nice thing about a solved case is we can really start getting into more than just observational investigative approaches. So we do these things, our recognitions, controlled recognitions, where once we've identified that person, we call them the previous personality, we can get pictures of them and then some foil pictures or pictures of the house that the person lived in and then some foil homes. And we show them to the kids and say, okay, so which of these two or three was, you? your father in your past life, which of these was the home that you lived in in that past life. And in many of these cases, the kids are significantly better than chance at picking the right photos. And most of these cases, remember, most of these cases, like I said, 60-plus years, long before the internet existed and people could just suddenly know that, oh, this, in that country,

somehow they would have answers to all these very specific, detailed questions. So, yeah, it's confounding. it's fantastic, and yet there's 60 plus years of evidence suggesting it. And your job is to kind of comb through this archive and study it, right? It's part of my job, yes. Part of your job, yes. Okay, are there any specific examples or cases that you personally like that you wouldn't mind sharing?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the two, I'll talk about the two most famous ones from my current, our current head at the Department, at the Division of Perceptial Studies, Dr. Jim Tucker. And for anyone who's interested, after you listen to every one of Jack's podcasts, go to Netflix and watch episode six of the documentary called Surviving Death. It covers these two cases. And one of them is the James Leiniger case. James Leiniger was from Louisiana. He, as a very young child, started talking about how he had died in a plane crash while he was fighting the Japanese. So he was in World War II, and he claimed when his father started, and his parents were certainly his father, but I think

both parents, as I recall, were quite dismissive of it at first, but it kept coming up. He was also one of these children that had very distressing nightmares and traumatic sort of distressful plays, scenarios, he would often wake up in the middle of the night screaming, little man on fire, little man on fire. So you can imagine as a parent how traumatizing that would be to see a young child like going through these as if you had had this experience. And that's not that uncommon, by the way. 65% of our cases in our database are children, two to three years old, roughly on average, talking about a traumatic, unnatural, often violent death. So it's, yeah, that's partly why the parents strange because it's like, also it's, children of that age usually aren't capable of comprehending

concepts like that or even death. I feel like that something has to be explained to them at some point, and it's usually after, like, I didn't know about it. Yeah, they are, they're speaking in detail about things that they should not, and most parents would say there's no way they could know this. We've never exposed them to any of this. So James, yeah, James talked, his father would start probing like in a way to try to refute what he didn't want to be. He literally was pushing back against it. He thought it was nonsense, this notion of a past life. And I remember part of the notes from this case is he asked James as a child, what was the ship you were on? He says he talked about he was on a ship and flew off of it like an aircraft carrier presumably. And he looked at him and confidently the boy

said, Natoma. And the father responded, I think that's a Japanese name. Right. It's like you said you were an American fighter, and he said, no, dad, it wasn't. It was an American ship. And James Langegger's father went to the computer and did some searching. And sure enough, it turns out that in Iwo Jima, which is where the area that he, the boy claimed to have been in around that area in the fighting, there was a U.S. aircraft carrier called the Natoma Bay. And James Lineger actually said, they said who else was there at one point. And he said a name. He just went, Jack Larson. And it turned out, long story short, there was a Jack Larson also on the Natoma Bay. And they've actually met him at one point. They went and met Jack Larson and I think Jack Larson's family.

So again, this is one of these cases where you just, when you look at, he only, the funny thing about the James Lenniger case is that he only made a certain number, a small number of statements. There are some kids who have multiple dozens of statements that can be checked. But James Linerger's were very, very, the things that could be factually checked, there were only a handful of them, but they were aw, just oddly dead on about something. There's just no, how could this kid know the name Jack Larson? He even, he kept calling himself James III, James III, I'm James the third, because he was James. And it turns out that he claimed his previous personality was someone named James Houston. That's what they discovered. And it turns out that James Houston, and the previous personality was a junior.

So James Leiniger would have been the third James in that succession of Jameses. So it's just, again, it's just one of these things where you just think, how is this happening? And what do we make of it? I don't know. But that is a case that is just to become a sort of famous, modern American case. The other one that Jim did that's also in that documentary is a young boy named Ryan Hammonds. This is one where he had multiple dozens of statements that were just, more than 40 of them have been proven to be correct based on the past personality.

He talked about having been in the movies and been an old sort of Hollywood actor. And in his past life memories when he first started talking about it. And at one point, his parents were looking through a book of old black and white films. And there was a scene from a movie where George Raft, a very famous old. black and white era movie star was in the scene. And in the sort of on barely in the photo is just a secondary character, like an extra almost. And Ryan just pointed it goes, that's me. But first I think he actually went, oh, there's George. And then he goes, oh, look, Mommy, that's me. And he pointed at this other face in the thing. And there was no name because it wasn't about them. It was about George

Raft. It was, this was just like an extra in this black and white film. And Jim, as a researcher, actually was able to contact like an archivist in Hollywood, and they found some press material for that particular movie that was in that book. And they had one photo of this person that he pointed to, so they could actually identify what his name was. And thus being solved at that point, they were able to verify that upwards of 41 statements that Ryan made over the years as a young child about the life he lived,

what street he lived on. He said, I think it had the name Rocker Stone in it where I used to live. And it turns out that this old extra actor, Marty Martin, was his name, lived on a street called Roxbury Lane. So he actually, Ryan, as a boy, Ryan said, I died when I was 61. And Jim actually counted that as incorrect because all the documentation he could find pointed to Marty Martin dying at the age of 59, not 61. It turns out later that Marty Martin's family actually found his real original birth certificate that showed that he actually was 61 when he died.

So Ryan Hammonds as a child knew something that even like the published information about this old Hollywood, you know, Broadway. And he also did some Broadway vaudeville stuff was actually incorrect. Probably as an actor, you probably wanted to not be, you always wanted to be a little bit younger is my guess. So maybe he, you know, even just a few years maybe, maybe at some point he just told that. They're all doing that. Yeah, exactly. But it's just one of those things. You're like originally counted as, oh, boy, he got that wrong.

No, he was incredibly right and no one knew it. For the record, for the audience, I'm 24 myself. And very handsome if you've never seen me. So just know that. And I'm six foot three with a beautiful head of hair and 35. Same, actually, same, same. All right, we have to take a break. We'll be right back.

with the rest of this interview. So these are all from kids, but I don't want to go down a tangent on this, but there's also like past life regression therapy where like an adult will be put into a hypnotic state. And then, you know, you're supposed to remember your past, various past lives, right? I'm more skeptical of this. And the way I always joke about it is that I'm skeptical because it seems like everybody that does it comes out saying like,

oh, I was a civil war commander. and a hero, but on the good side, by the way. Oh, and I, yeah, I didn't own slaves. Or I was like, I was a cool pirate. I was a princess. You know, it's always something like exciting or glamorous. Right. It's like, oh, everybody was a commander in the Civil War.

Everybody was, you know, exactly. I want to be very clear that Dops' position, basically, is that we don't, none of this. We don't, we simply do not invest. and have not investigate cases that are of that kind of the sort of regressing back into your past life memories and such that it's it's not that if it's an adult for some reason that is we'll listen to them but only if somehow they're saying when I was a child these were and I can verify that with my still existing parents or something like that we might investigate that but we don't investigate

anything that has to do with regressing you know hypnotic sort of suggestive stuff we also that's a good point is in this database of 22 200 plus cases. Yeah, they're not, no one's claiming to have been like Genghis Khan. It's like they're just, that was, I pulled a cart and I sold milk. I mean, it's, it's, you know, or I was just a soldier in a war. That's kind of common. So, yeah, none of that stuff is, we don't engage in any of that.

Yeah, because I think in, in reality, most people's ancestors were just like peasants eating barley and water on the outskirts of some town in the woods, most likely. you know. But I don't mean that to discount anyone who, you know, has done that therapy and believes it or whatever. But I think there's something much more striking and unexplainable about a child saying this stuff in a way. First of all, like we said, they're expressing things that a normal kid that's two to three can't even comprehend typically. Exactly. the concepts of death.

Even like having a different parent, I don't think I, I mean, I didn't know I had a middle name until I was like six. Like, there's like, I remember little moments

where I'm like told things like, oh, Jack, you have another name. Like, you have to learn this. You know, there's these landmarks where you learn stuff.

And it's easy to think of an adult accidentally thinking of something in their head. But kids, that young, they're just kind of not capable of inventing something that complex or even knowing about World War II, depending on what that happened. Yeah, there was a case that was covered in the Washington Post recently. They did a story on Jim and one of his children, and this was a young child that started talking about their death in basically, there's the,

She talked about the tattooed number on her wrist and the blue deadly smoke that was overcoming everybody and killing them. And so you can see clearly where this is going is this investigation led to basically potentially a child of an age where the mother says, I don't understand how my daughter can even know about the fact that tattooed numbers were used in the Holocaust and that there was deadly gas. She, we've never, there's just no way that a child of her age and given the scope of young children the way they're protected and the bubbles they live in, the mothers just was exasperate. She was just like, how is this possible? I don't understand it. She's so specifically talking about something that clearly is a person who seems to have died in a concentration camp and explained to me how my daughter knows these things. It's just, it's confounding.

It's, it's, yeah. I'm going to continue asking you questions, but if you ever think of examples like this, do not hesitate to share because I love hearing these. These are so fascinating. I could just listen to them all day. How old do these kids tend to remember these things? Does it become a part of their life?

Yeah, that's a great question, and I can answer that very clearly. We know that generally, again, we're looking at a huge database and we're just extracting what we can out of it. There are obviously extremes at either end. But roughly two and three quarters to seven years of age is when children will be expressing these apparent what seem like memories. And roughly around seven on average is when they just stop.

It doesn't mean that they've forgotten at seven. It means that it's what we just kind of talked about. Kids at that age are no longer in those tiny little. protective three, four, five-year-old bubbles. They're in school with friends and they have events and they're going to part. It's like their world just becomes and their brain is changing literally physiologically. And it just seems like what we're assuming is happening is at some point it just fades. It just goes away.

Now we did a study. We have a paper under review right now. My colleague, Marietta Pellivanova and I and Jim Tucker put this paper out. It's not being peer reviewed right now. where it's the first follow-up study of American cases, we were able to get, unfortunately, it's not a huge number. They tried to get more, but we got 23 now adults, who on average was 30 plus years ago were interviewed as children

by researchers at Dobbs for their past life memories. And what's interesting about that is that 50% of that 23 said they have basically no memory of the memories. Like they're just gone. The other, I think it's about 48%, it's 52.48, I think is the way it worked out, who do say they have some memories of it. It's perhaps not surprising, given what we've been talking about. It's one of the key things that they still remember is how they died, how they, their memories of how that person died.

Because, again, so many of these are so traumatic and violent that they, that's lasted through. What's interesting is we also were able to assess a number of parents, multiple dozens of parents of children who had had their children interviewed, adopts, and investigated. And they remember everything. I mean, like, basically, I think almost 80 percent of them are like, oh, yeah, I remember the event, I remember the stories, I remember the trauma. They overinflate the negative experience that their child had so that children don't seem

to say it was that negative. But again, it's everything we've been talking about. The parents seeing these things, hearing these, seeing their kid waking up from nightmares, is dying in a fire, let's say, right? Of course, as a parent, you're going to remember that. And of course, you're going to assume, oh, my God, this is terrible for my child, even years later.

The nice thing I think we want to add to that, which we put in the paper, is that almost all the parents, I think it was uniform across the board, said, and we just asked, like, we didn't, like, probe for this question. We just sort of, anything else you want to say about your experience in this process.

And they, almost every single one of them said, I was just so happy in a, maybe happy is not the word they used, but I was just so grateful that DOPS took us seriously and listened to us, and it provided us comfort, and it made us think maybe we're not crazy. So in some ways, I think there's such a human part to this. I like the paranormal aspect of it and the potential anomalous parts to it, but it's also human beings with children, it's families. And when you really read a lot of these cases, it's important to remember that.

These are not people who are looking to get famous. these are not people. No one wants to go public and say, my kid thinks he was, you know, died in a former life. I mean, they're embarrassed. They're worried about the stigma of it all. And they're scared. And it's just really interesting to kind of like see that years later the parents are still like, thank you for taking it seriously. Are there any common themes with, I mean, I'm sure there are, but what are the common themes of these stories and the experiences of the kids? kids. Definitely. The patterns. Yeah. So the patterns are there are patterns of age, like we said. They're patterns of, we know that these children, we've investigated them in multiple countries and other investigators have around the world. They are exceptional, they are significantly more intelligent for their age than controlled children who aren't expressing memories. They're significantly more

verbally sort of capable, verbal skills are significantly higher and better than control kids without memories. As I said, 65%, you know, to me, that's a trend, are talking about traumatic, unnatural, often violent, even intentionally violent deaths. There is an interesting trend that I'll throw out there, which is something that Ian Stevenson wrote two books on. Biology and Reincarnation was the name of the books, Volume 1, Volume 2. In that, you want your mind blown a little bit. There are documented cases where he especially, it happened more of this investigative work

was done in the past than it's being done now, where a child would be telling a story about their past life, like we've been talking about, saying some memories, expressing memories, and talking about how they had been shot in the head, let's say. That's, again, one of the cases. And it turns out that when the parents shaved the boy's head, there were birth marks and birth defects that mapped onto what later were found on the autopsy reports of that previous personality almost exactly where the person had been shot.

We have pictures in our offices, which you should come to visit someday, of children who told stories of having been killed with a machete, and they were born with half of their arm missing. And sure enough, eventually investigators were able to document that that solved case, the previous personality, had died, and had that part of his arm cut off in having been murdered with the machete. So as bizarre as that sounds, one of the trends, it's such a, it's such a repetitive feature over the course of the decades of this work that we have developed, Jim Tucker developed this scoring system of cases that creates just a number, a continuous measure, and it's called the strength of case scale. And the stronger your case, the higher the number,

the stronger your case is, the more suggestive it is that maybe the explanation is an anomalous one, right? In other words, you can see the R word. And that is one of the ways in which you get points in the strength of case scale is, do you have birth defects or birth marks that are verifiably tied to unknown birth marks or instances of the previous personality's body being either harmed or already happening? having had that feature before they died. So that's pretty crazy. Okay.

As long as we're talking about crazy, forgive me for having a moment where I might sound like some guy smoking a joint behind a party talking to you. Okay, so like if we say for a second that reincarnation of sorts is real and consciousness is something that carries on beyond death and, you know, comes from the outside. If we're talking about evolution, it would be beneficial for a person

who died abnormally and suddenly to go back immediately because they would have learned some kind of lesson of like, oh, don't do that. Like, don't go there wherever you died. Like, don't go try to pet a lion, right? Like, you can imagine, like, the earliest humans. I always wondered that myself.

like how do people, how do we find out which plants are poisonous? There's so many people who had to die over and over again. But I don't know. It's striking. Your mind can easily go down those paths, but it's like, oh, if you were to believe those were real, like there would be a reason to send somebody back immediately if they died. Yeah, I think there is a lot of that sort of notion of it also could be like unfinished business, right? there could be that you you didn't do what you were in a sense like perhaps you were meant to a lot of

near to the experiences talk about like that like they're told when again by the way not trying to shift gears we we're starting to take a very clear obvious approach adopts which says if again if consciousness exists outside the body if it's fundamental in some way and it isn't some byproduct of neurons and dendrites well then the process of consciousness outside of the body should be the process, right? Whether it's reincarnation, whether it's near-death experience, whether it's whatever you're talking about, it seems like there's going to be,

like it's going to work the way it works, right? In that sense. So from our perspective, is we can learn a lot about the past life memory cases, the court cases, by looking at some of what the near-death experience was talk about. And there is overlap there. And some of them say it was made clear to me

or I became known in that process when I was not in my body, that I was not done yet, that I had more work to do, even if they weren't always explicitly told what that work was. It's this sense of like you need to get back because you haven't accomplished yet what you're supposed to accomplish. So it is fascinating to me that you can think about that in so many different ways about consciousness and why reincarnation.

Now, the bigger, but an important question is, well, why these children? Why is it that what is it about these cases? because presumably, if we're going to have fun for a moment at that party and think in that way about reincarnation being real, you have to start asking, well, then have we all been reincarnated? Or is it only a, I mean, I can't assume, I don't think it makes sense to assume it's only these children and every one of them who has reincarnated just can talk about this past life. So in other words, why is it that these children, it's almost like if everyone, if everyone, is not everyone, but if many more people than these children are going through this process, but they're the only ones that are able to kind of seemingly talk about it. Is it a glitch? Has something gone wrong? Like in the process? Like, it's not supposed to work that way, right?

Like, it's supposed to be more seamless if that's what's happening. So we're trying right now, we're literally putting together a huge grant proposal to start trying to get to that question, which is we've investigated it enough to start asking, instead of looking for evidence of it, we're going to start trying to, if we can, look for process. Why and how is this happening? Because I think that's the most important next question to answer, or at least to ask. So, yeah, we can have fun there if you want in that space with the obvious caveat that it's just having fun about what it means. I mean, the other idea is also, by the way, consciousness, you know, presumably if you are to take the perspective that many people take in physics about space time,

presumably that would suggest that you you can't always think about this in a linear way that we think about time, right? I mean, it's possible that when I die, again, assuming, taking that large, fun view that reincarnation is real, when my meat suit dies and my consciousness is going to reincarnate,

maybe it reincarnates as a caveman. Maybe it reincarnates in the future. Maybe it reincarnates in another, dimension or many world hypothesis kind of, you know, multiverse thing. Maybe it's some, I mean, if it's, if consciousness is unbound by the sort of physical realities of the material world that makes sense to us and is purely linear, and yet we seem to have this notion from some physicists that that's not maybe the way time and space really are, well, then that changes things in terms of the way we think about this process. That is so interesting. Before I forget, you did

mention your starting the fundraising and this proposal for this huge project. If there are any eccentric billionaires listening to this right now, I would say, do not hesitate to reach out to DOPS if you're interested in funding some interesting research because, I mean, I wish I had the means to fund this myself. Maybe one day, maybe one day, other world will be big enough. But In the meantime, this is just so exciting you guys are doing this in the first place. I appreciate that request. And certainly, we are open to talk to anyone who would like to help us continue doing this work. To me, it's just, it's maybe some of the most important questions that we can be asking

and trying to get serious scientific answers to and for. So that's what we're trying to do. Even the things you might discover on accident in the process, right? Exactly. Like some of our biggest discoveries were kind of done a mistake trying to find something else. Exactly. Good research should just simply generate more questions. And there's nothing at all wrong with being open to the fact that if you had a hypothesis, you're probably wrong.

And just look at the data and let the data guide you at some point. It's good to work with hypotheses. It's good to have theory. But at the end of the day, we're also human. human beings and I'm more than comfortable. I mean, it's kind of an old school idea of what science really ought to be, which is at the end of the day, we should assume pretty much everything we're doing is wrong and just keep trying to figure out what the next best way to ask the question is. Next question I have is, are there any patterns with the delay between dying and

then coming back? Like these kids that remember their death, how long does it seem like they're gone in between. Yeah, we call it the intermission period. And there are, there's some, it's, again, varies widely. I think it's about 16 months. I could clarify that with you. I should probably be more specific. I should have checked before we started today. But there is a, not in time, but there's a real interesting, what we talked about earlier, overlap with the near-to-the-experience folks, is that what a number of children who do talk about memories from that time, right? So they actually talk about before they became their cells, but they were after the previous personality. So they speak about that period, we call

the intermission period. And there is a correlation with near-to-the-experiencers. Near-to-the- experiencers will often say things like it became known to me, it became clear to me, I learned while I was there that I had chosen my current life. And children have said oh, I chose my parents, and I chose to become this person in this new life. So what's really fascinating is, to me, we're talking a lot about that, this sense of the autonomy that appears to be a part of consciousness outside of the body, that perhaps it may not be for every case, it may just be people saying things, trying to make sense of something that is literally ineffable.

I don't, you know, and they're just, this is what it comes out. But it's striking to me that in both cases of near-to-the-experiences and these young children talking about that intermission period have, in many cases, used a description of choice and autonomy in the life that they are currently leading. And I think there's something really neat about that. I know need is not necessarily the most scientific word. But it feels really interesting to me that people debate here on, the planet all the time is there's such a thing as free will. And, you know, there are good

arguments for it and there are good arguments against it, philosophically and even scientifically. But yet when you look at some of these people and you look at these cases of consciousness, perhaps existing outside the body, seems like free will exists and autonomy exists, which is, I think, fascinating. That's really, I have a million questions now, but one that just popped into my head is, um, do, are there any patterns with, um, do people tend to come back in like the, the same like country or ethnicity, uh, as like, like, for instance, are you seeing any examples of like a kid in America being like, oh yeah, I was Chinese? Like, I've never been here before. Like I, okay, interesting. But we also have, I mean, there are a number of cases where it's same

family, right? So it just runs the gamut, right? So we have, we have cases that the child is basically saying, I was your, to their parents, I was your great-grandmother, right? That kind of, so it's like coming back from a past person in the family. But we just, we've had someone come over with the transom recently, as we said, we get a lot of them emailed to us. A family in California, I believe, was, had a child talking about apparently a life in some sub-Saharan Africa, sub-Saharan. African country, and this is fascinating. The parents described that the child was even speaking in a click language, which would have correlated to that country, and they were just thoroughly confused as to what was happening. And this is another thing that if you want, you're mind blown.

I'm about, I'm halfway through a paper with Jim and Marietta right now. It'll be submitted probably by the end of July, where we have 40 cases in our database. It's only 40, right? So that doesn't sound like a lot when you know there's 2,200 plus, but 40 cases that have documented a yes to the question, does this case exhibit what's known as xenoglossy? And xenoglossy, if you don't know, is controversial. But what it is is somebody speaking a language, a real language, that they should not naturally be able to know or speak. They've never learned it. No one in their family. learned and speaks it. And yet somehow they do. And just like this child, who the parents seemed to be suggesting was communicating in a language that it should not know, we have 40 cases in our database

that in the investigative process, people would tell stories and would be confirmed to the best ability of like neighbors or other people saying, yeah, I was there. The kid was speaking Spanish when he shouldn't have been. I don't know how he could have known those words. And I'm trying right now, this paper is a paper to try to make sense of that. I can't validate that these kids, some of these kids are no longer even alive, that they spoke this language. What I'm basically going to do is I'm going to take the approach that, look, 40 cases exist in our database that there is evidence. I went through each and every file. So I pulled all the files for, there was actually 41, and one of them was coded incorrectly. So again, being as objective as possible. Okay,

we have 40 cases, and I can see why, I can read the examples that were provided. in the investigative notes as to why, yes, this kid seemed to be speaking a language that it shouldn't know. And the way I'm approaching it is, if this is wrong or fraudulent or just people telling tales, then presumably that should show up across this database randomly, right? It should presumably just be 40 cases with no systematic story behind it, right? That's the best way I can approach it. And, well, guess what? There is a systematic story.

40 cases are significantly different from the non-Zinoglossy cases, the cases where there are explicitly no evidence of xenoglossy. And they are significantly different in a really intriguing way. They are different in the way that they are significantly more likely to have died intentionally violently. So in other words, these were cases, these 40 children were significantly more likely using a statistical test to have claimed to have been murdered, basically, stabbed, shot, whatever it might be on purpose.

They are significantly more likely to have been, the investigator, to have put in their notes that when these children are recalling their memories, they experience extreme emotional distress, as opposed to some people, some of these kids just speak matter-of-factly, but some go through tears and screams and tantrums

and nightmares, And these group is that the 40 are significantly more likely to have that. The 40 are significantly more likely to have told their parents and or the investigator, I desperately want to get back to my previous family and would actually try to do that compared to the rest of them. So there's this coherent story. There's a couple other variables that basically these 40 cases of apparent xenoglossy, or at least coded as xenogloss cases, are from highly traumatic, highly, emotionally, highly distressing experiences in the previous personality.

So we get back to that point I made earlier about, is there a glitch? Is something gone wrong in the process? And that's one of the approaches we're trying to take now, is perhaps there's something to this trauma experience that somehow it doesn't allow the process to occur the way it's supposed to occur. And thus, these children have the memories and have these extremely odd experiences in their memories. So hopefully that was clear.

No, that makes perfect sense. It's so interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating to me. And again, I can't validate that, you know, the stories are amazing. Like, there's a case of two twin girls who were from Burma in the 1970s who had past life memories. They talked about being Japanese soldiers who were brothers in World War II. They weren't twins, but they were brothers fighting in the same platoon in World War II. And they talked about dying together.

They were in the same platoon. They were being bombed at a time in a certain country. They even named the country. And Ian Stevenson validated that at that time in that country in that month that they claimed, the British forces were actually bombing part of that region of that country. So there was bombing at that point in that country, in that month. And the Burmese twins would say said that they died, not from the bombing, but that somehow the bombing caused their hand grenades to explode

and their own hand grenades killed them at the same time. And now they're these Burmese twin girls. And the whole long story ends with these twin Burmese girls would speak to each other in Japanese when they were children. And the neighbors and the family confirmed it. And in fact, not only did no one speak Japanese in that, which was so bizarre when you read this case study, their teachers and others would verify that

when they started learning Burmese, the language of their native language, they spoke it with a foreign accent. They spoke it as if they were from Burma originally. So it's just, again, I don't know what to make of it. It's absolutely mind-blowing when you look at some of this stuff and you look at the detail and the scope of the investigation and the amount of attempts to refute and or verify these claims. It's again, it's just at a time where, there was no way this family in Burma could have looked up on the internet, 1972, 73, whatever it was, it didn't exist. And yet there's evidence that can be corroborating these claims.

That is completely mind-blowing. This stuff is nuts. Let me ask you this also. The in-between time, what are the patterns that people describe of, like, where are they between life and death? is there a pattern? It really is difficult to determine because you have to remember. Even if there's no patterns, I just want to know what are they saying?

They say things that sometimes sound more like poetry because remember they're children, right? So they're, let alone it's hard for adults to try to describe the near-death experience period well. And most often an adult in that context will say, I'm not doing this justice. I can't find the words. So we have some kids who've talked about things. They talk about, again, this may not answer your question directly, but for those that do say something about that in between period, they'll say things like I was floating along in the air

and I was following my mother. She would go to a stream and I would follow her on occasion. I was like almost stalking my mother. And then at some point I just decided to drop myself into the bucket of water that I knew she would drink from so that I could become her baby. right i mean it's like it's poetry it's like it's some sort of like again it's a kid it's a two and a half to five-year-old kid trying to make sense of something that presumably they think is real and may or may not be and yet these are the ways that it comes out so it's hard for us to really dig into other than

broad themes like the autonomy thing right like you can see that like even there like to me that story i would take from that story which is an actual case that we have and i wouldn't really pursue too much of that, I think, at least at first glance, as a researcher about any other than just, aha, I could code that as autonomy, as choice. I chose this mother, right? To me, it's like the story is interesting, and maybe if we found other kids saying something similar, then it becomes a way that we can link it together. But what that story tells me is, here's another kid talking about, I chose this life. I chose that mother. that is very interesting what about

maybe this is outside of your specific research but maybe DOPS research what about people immediately after they die is there any patterns of like where they describe going is it a place like are there people there I mean I've seen small patterns of my own show but I'm just curious if there is any yeah the near death experiencers um We'll talk about, first, it's basically they have an out-of-body experience first.

Very, very commonly, they just sort of are positioned somewhere outside. They can see themselves. They can see if it's a hospital room, like a surgery table. They can see the people. And that's some of our veridical, so-called veridical near-to-the-experiences, which just means verifiable or truthful. And all that really means is that there are cases where someone will say, I saw that.

I then suddenly was in down the hall and I could see my family in the waiting room and a nurse came up to them and said something to them. And then later the investigator will discover that, yes, in fact, that happened. Like the nurse will go, yeah, I did that. That's the nurse who said those exact words, which is like, okay, there's no way if all of this is occurring in this person's brain in some hormone release or some drug-induced state, they shouldn't be able to tell you about a conversation that's occurring down the hall and explicitly who said it and what was said. So there's that component. But then eventually they do leave their sort of tether outside of the room, the location where they are immediately in danger or seemingly have died. And the common story is, again, this is a very Western.

People will say, oh, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. But what researchers have found is that the tunnel thing is just a Western. we know tunnels, right? There are cultures where they don't have tunnels, and they describe something different. They use different words that you can interpret as, oh, that would be, I would have said, it's a tunnel. They're saying it's something else. So there does seem to be this sort of, this traveling sort of through space that, again, a Western mind would conceive as a tunnel, and that this bright, all-encompassing light is at the end, that eventually, become enveloped in.

And the most common theme is once they're in that place, once the light is on them, where they are in it, is it just sounds woo-woo, but this is just so common. Or woo-woo podcast. Yeah, exactly. It's right. I get it. It's just, it's all-encompassing, all love. It's just wrapped in warmth and comfort and love.

And in many cases, people, this is what's really fascinating. This is true for people who have out-of-body experiences as well that aren't necessarily near-death experiences. You will see people in the near-the-experts literature saying it was, yes, it was all-encompassing, it was love, it was wonderful, but it also was I was home. Like it was where I, this is, they start seeing this, the physical reality that they're back in and that we live in as the temporary place. And the feeling is like, oh my gosh, it's so good to be back here. here. So that to me, these are the kinds of things when you read that and you hear that, again, as we said earlier, Jack, how is that evolutionarily in us? That doesn't make sense to me. I don't know how that comes to adapt over time in a species that is totally driven evolutionarily

to do everything not to die and prevent it from happening. And yet somehow we developed that in the background is like, okay, but when you do, we're going to make this easy. easier on you and it's going to look like this way cross-culturally and you're going to have this experience. Why? I just don't know how that could be. Allow me to have another stoner moment, but, you know, like, I hear that a lot saying that like this feeling of all-encompassing love or you'll hear people say that like everything is love. Like that's the whole point. It sounds very crystal lady, right? It's easy to like laugh at that. But I mean, it's it's interesting to think that like maybe what we feel as love is just like a small sample of that,

which we've all experienced before. I sound very much like a stoner right now, but it's like, we just call that feeling, we call that love. Exactly. We've like named it that. Maybe with all of these things that seem very heady to think about,

I think it's good to try to like reverse it, right? Yep. A lot of these things are interesting when you kind of like flip it around, right? like even with um i don't know when you think about like the skeptical explanations of a near-death experience or whatever it's like oh well you know religion's been around a long time and this is your brain taking all of the religious beliefs and you know forming this thing that is going to give you comfort where you're dying it's just like your brain trying to relax you if you flip that like i i'm more i'm more apt to believe like the the flipped version where it's

it's like maybe all of our religions, once again, stoner moment for sure, but maybe all of our religions come from people experiencing these things as miracles and then forming religions around those. Like, you know, it's, we'll see if I added this stuff out of the podcast. No, it's great. It's fun to think about. I agree. And I think that's exactly the point is that it kind of goes back to what I said earlier.

I have to remember when you read these things, people should. There are great repositories of them out there. I-A-N-D-S, International Association and Near-Death Studies. They have had, I think they still do. That's where I was reading decades ago as a young scholar. All the reports, there are books, there are all kinds of ways that you can read these experiencers' narratives. And they're powerful, and they will move you to tears at times. And yet at the same time, what you kind of said is exactly the point is, as powerful as they are,

they are human beings doing the very best they can to describe something that is literally not, it is indescribable. It is just, it is ineffable. They will say, I am not doing this justice. I cannot, the word that they use is love, right? But that doesn't mean, it's like, it, it, no doubt isn't what we think of when we're talking about love. It is something, I think that's why I think it's important to kind of triangulate. So they talk about all encompassing love. They talk about I feel like I was home. Like I was always, this is where I'm supposed to be and that everything else is temporary.

It's like when you start putting together like the different ways that people talk about it, maybe you're going to get closer to some broader understanding of what that might actually be unless we have the experience ourselves. And understanding that even if we were to have a near to the experience, we would fail miserably to describe it apparently. We would do everything we could and yet come up short. And to me, there's something really, again, really diagnostic about that. When a human being struggles to describe an experience they've had,

that tells you something about that experience that suggests to me, right? Like, I can describe in detail a dream, right? And I can tell you exactly what I did in the dream and kind of the easy. even the emotion that I felt in the dream, and then I forget about it, like, two minutes later, and I'm on living my life. It's like, this isn't that. This isn't that.

I mean, this is like Bruce Grayson did a follow-up study on Near-Deth Experience narratives where many years later, he went back and had them retell their stories and the narratives. And years, years later, they hadn't embellished, but they hadn't forgotten it. It was like the correspondence between what, what they told on first go right after it happened, and many, many years later, isn't like any other human sort of memory experience process where we just kind of forget or we confabulate.

We sort of add things that really weren't there. There's a, in so many cases, there is an inability to describe it, and yet there is correlation between the stories, and they're not telling anything, they're not adding, they're not making it prettier, they're not making it. To me, there's no other human experience like that. That's not the way our memories work. So that, to me, is again, just without getting into other ways

that you can study these things, to me, there's something really diagnostic about these moments and these powerful moments that transcend human processing of memory and description and time. And I just think that tells me something here is it's just too simple to say, oh,

a drug was released in your brain and you just had this experience. I just don't. That to me is a unsatisfactory, unsatisfying explanation. Well, Philip, thank you so much for talking to me. This is completely mind-blowing. Where can people learn more about your research and DOPS itself? Yeah, thanks for having me, first of all. Thanks for the great conversation. And I think basically the easiest thing to do is go to Google, search, UVA DOPS. Just you put that in, and one of the first things you'll get, you'll see the

division of perceptual studies at the University of Virginia Medical School. That's us. We have a website where we have almost every publication that we get published is on there. We've got pages. If you're a parent, by the way, one of our most, and it's by far, I don't have the metric, but I mean it literally exponentially, we had a report recently from University of Virginia that of all the public facing websites in the medical school, the number one by an exponential amount of visits is the page of parents, for parents with children expressing memories of possibly a past life. It's like it's there. You'll see it.

It gives you advice. It gives you guidance. It has some links. So if there are parents out there listening to this and you have, understand, we know, we're not trying to do this necessarily from an exploitive or we're just titillated by these great stories we see you we hear you we know what you're going through we've been doing this long enough to understand and there are resources out there so i want to let you know for those folks as well they can find it but yeah pretty much uva dops google that and you'll get to us yeah if you have

experienced that or an nDE reach out to dops but also stories at otherworldpod dot com you can do it at the same time. You can do it at the same time. But I mean, I love to hear these stories. I hope I get more myself. But I'm so glad you guys are out there. I think DOPS would be a lot more helpful and scientific than us. But I would love to hear it. I would love to hear it if you have stories out there. Thank you so much, Philip, for joining us. And folks, thank you for listening. Yeah, my pleasure. Okay. Thank you so much to Dr. Philip Cozalino. Thank you again as well to Dops and Maggie Guggenheimer for helping put this together. As I'm sure you could tell, this type of stuff gets me really hyped up,

mainly because these things specifically happen often enough that mainstream science has acknowledged that it is indeed happening. We just simply don't know why or how it happens. The issue is that it's hard to study, and most institutions haven't dedicated enough resources to do it properly in the past. For that reason, I'm so happy that DOPS exists and is doing this work, and I hope they continue to grow and hopefully find some answers to these great mysteries in the future.

I'm hoping to interview several more researchers from DOPS as we go along. In the meantime, if you'd like to learn more about DOPS and their work, visit www. www.UVA-dops.org. that's UVA-D-O-P-S dot org. Once again, my name is Jack Wagner, and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive-produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our theme song is by Cobra Man.

This episode was edited by Theo Krantz and engineered by Theo Schaefer. Our artwork is by Coldestack Studios. Nikki Kate Delgado is our associate producer, production help by Haley Pearson. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about Otherworld. If you want to hear bonus episodes,

you can become a patron at patreon.com slash Otherworld. Our social media is at Otherworld Pod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Jenna Weiss-Berman, Leah Reese Dennis, Rob Morandi, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Moor-Kurran, Josephina Francis, and Hillary Schuff.

Follow and listen to Otherworld now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained, you could send us your story at Stories at otherworldpod.com