Reincarnation doesn’t seem like it’s a supernatural phenomenon that’s going to be definitively proven anytime soon with scientific research or study of any kind. But the descriptions in people’s reports of memories of past lives can be studied, and recently were. A study published in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice that peered into 1,600 stories of reincarnation found a weird recurring pattern in the tales.
Researchers at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies went through an extensive archive of over 1,600 cases where kids allegedly recalled the life of a specific, identifiable dead person.
First, let’s define a term: Intermission Time, which is the kind of temporal waiting period between a person dying and getting recycled back into a newborn baby. That time, according to the pattern uncovered by the researchers, is roughly 16 months among the cases that actually had a timetable attached to them.
People Who Died Suddenly or Violently Were Reportedly Reincarnated Faster, Study Finds
There were some exceptions that also yielded some fascinating patterns. Whenever a person died a sudden, unexpected death, or if it was violent, their soul was apparently moved further up the respawn queue, taking only 12 months to reincarnate, a 40 percent reduction compared to people who had died slowly from natural causes.
Lead author Saeedeh Sadeghi and her team tested for every logical explanation imaginable, trying to find some connective thread that can explain why so many of these very specific timelines are cropping up.
Things like parental involvement or religious beliefs or maybe some lightly shared cultural folklore might help explain… Some aspect of this. It didn’t. Researchers admit they don’t really know how to explain any of this. They admit that the accelerated rebirth pattern among people who died unexpectedly was even stronger in families whose religions didn’t believe in reincarnation.
None of this is definitive proof of an afterlife or of reincarnation. It’s more likely that all of this could be chalked up to coincidence, a statistical quirk. But it is a weird correlation that’s difficult to explain, and may never have a neat and tidy explanation. But, hey, feel free to use this as the basis of your next horror novel. It seems ripe for spooky supernatural narratives.
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