Near-Death Experiences and Past-Life Memories
Philip J. Cozzolino, PhD, relates his origin story as a researcher of extraordinary human experiences
Philip J. Cozzolino is an associate professor of research in the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Philip received his PhD in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 2006 and spent seventeen years at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom prior to joining DOPS.
Philip’s research explores how individuals seek meaning in life, with a particular focus on the positive psychological consequences of death awareness. Inspired by evidence from DOPS-generated research into near-death experiences, Philip is responsible for a psychological model that links healthy and honest considerations of human mortality to increased well-being, heightened desires for self-direction, and more authentic living.
You can find him on Substack and YouTube.
Researching the Extraordinary
In 2004, I published my first peer-reviewed paper in psychology exploring the potentially positive effects of honest and deliberative considerations of mortality. In that paper (and in the bulk of the research I’ve conducted in the twenty-plus years since), I incorporated lessons learned from decades of studies into near-death experiences by scholars such as Drs. Bruce Greyson, Raymond Moody, and Kenneth Ring, to name only a few. It is a remarkable point of pride for me that I am now—many years later—a colleague of Bruce Greyson at the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) in the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia.
DOPS was founded in 1967 by Dr. Ian Stevenson, who at the time was the chair of the Department of Psychiatry at UVA. DOPS is a research group devoted to the rigorous evaluation of empirical evidence related to the mind’s relationship to the body and the possibility of consciousness surviving physical death (i.e., near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, after-death communications, psychic ability). This exciting, yet challenging, endeavor involves studying phenomena that challenge mainstream scientific paradigms regarding the nature of human consciousness.
At DOPS, my days are occupied by asking questions about “extraordinary human experiences,” including near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and reports from children who seem to be expressing memories from a past life. I’ll share some of the lessons we’ve learned about these topics later, but first, I’d like to share a bit about how someone like me finds themselves working at a place as unique as DOPS.
My Origin Story
Recently, I was asked a question by an interviewer that is fairly standard for researchers at DOPS. Typically, the question is something like, “So, how did you get interested in studying these topics?” Although I want to be careful not to speak for my colleagues, I can say that the basic answer for most of us is complicated. What I mean to say is that, generally, professional researchers trained at traditional “R1” research institutions (universities with massive research expenditures that award numerous research doctorates) do not accidentally find their way into work focused on the possibility of consciousness surviving death. You discover quickly after arriving at a place like this that nearly everyone has a “DOPS origin story.” This is mine.
So, how did I get interested in studying these topics? Is it too strange to say that I came into this world interested in these topics? Let me explain. A few years ago, after many years of working as a professional psychologist studying the positive and negative effects of death awareness, I had a flash of memory from my childhood. Despite writing about near-death experiences for twenty years, I genuinely had not thought about this moment from my past before that flash. It was 1978, and I was nine years old. This was only three years after the term near-death experience was popularized by Dr. Raymond A. Moody in his seminal book, Life after Life.
Is it too strange to say that I came into this world interested in these topics?
A documentary called Beyond and Back was being released in American cinemas, and I had to see it. I made my mother take me to the movie theatre in Crystal Lake, Illinois, and I can remember actual moments from the film despite only seeing it that one time. When this memory came back to me a few years ago, I laughed out loud. Of course, it surprised me that I hadn’t thought of going to see the movie since that day, given my professional focus on near-death experiences, but most of all, I thought it was hilarious that, as a nine-year-old, I talked my mother into taking me to see it. I may not be the only boy of that age to know he had to see depictions of a possible afterlife, but it must have been pretty rare!
Eventually, I attended college pursuing a degree in communications with a special focus on film production. During this time, I became obsessed with two things: the first was great movies (Annie Hall and Crimes and Misdemeanors were viewed many times a month). The second was thoughts of death. This wasn’t all the time, but on more than a few occasions I found myself awake in my dorm room bed as the sun was rising, not having slept. The reason for this was always the same.
I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of “nothingness.” How could a person who has only ever known “everythingness” (or at the very least “somethingness”) contemplate a true nothing? Non-existence. Oblivion. This is not just ultimate darkness or a void of space and/or time, as those are all something. My recollection of these nights tells me that this wasn’t just an exercise driven by fear. It was more of an intellectual conundrum or puzzle that I couldn’t solve. Despite the seemingly enlightened nine-year-old that I once was—going to see stories of a potential afterlife—none of those stories provided any solace in these sleepless college nights.
A few years after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in communications, I started working as a writer and producer in broadcast news, first in Chicago and then in Los Angeles. The bulk of that time focused on O. J. Simpson and his murder/civil trials. When I lost my heart for that work, I quit my career and found my way into the psychology PhD program at the University of Minnesota. It was around this time that I discovered a theory called “terror management theory,” which highlights how fear of death leads individuals to invest in social/cultural beliefs and systems (e.g., religion, political ideologies) because they offer a sense of symbolic immortality.
The thread of life and death, and what it all means, was always there.
Although this process can reduce death anxiety in people, it can also lead to the defense of these beliefs and intense prejudice against people with different views, especially when the notion of mortality is brought to mind. The theory is derived from the book The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. It was this work that led to the first psychological studies I ever conducted, which were included in the 2004 paper I mentioned earlier, and that would later inform my model of mortality awareness known as the “dual-existential systems model.”
It was around this period, when—for the first time possibly since my college days—I sat down to watch Annie Hall. It had been one of my favorite films in those early university days, and I was excited to share it with a friend who hadn’t seen it. I was genuinely stunned when a scene that I didn’t remember started in which Woody Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, buys Annie Hall a book. That book was The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. I paused the movie and sat there dazed in my living room. Here I was, having quit my television career, thinking that I was making a massive shift in my life to study psychological processes related to mortality and meaning, and what I realized—once again—was that the thread of life and death, and what it all means, was always there.
As I mentioned earlier, we study extraordinary human experiences at DOPS. It's a challenging line of inquiry, not just because of the inherent difficulty in exploring the possibility of consciousness as a fundamental part of existence. It's difficult because most of these experiences (e.g., near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, after-death communications) are spontaneous in nature and not something that can be cued on demand in a research setting. We are often playing catch-up and learning as best we can from the experiencers. Part of my origin story involves my own spontaneous experiences. I can say confidently that—around the same period of time when I was rewatching Annie Hall in stunned silence—I had a classic out-of-body experience and a shared/veridical after-death communication. These were powerful moments, but somehow not quite as connected to that lifelong existential thread I mentioned earlier. They certainly have informed my work at DOPS, but I view them more as a glimpse into what's possible, not necessarily as fundamental to my core motivation for the work.
A Very Brief Look at the Evidence
The evidence collected over the years about these sorts of experiences is, in my view, impressive. Near-death experiencers around the world, and through numerous decades (even back to “The Myth of Er” that concludes Plato’s Republic), tell a compelling and consistent story. As assessed via the Near-Death Experience Scale devised by Bruce Greyson, there are cognitive elements (e.g., time dilation, deep understanding), affective elements (e.g., love, peace, joy), paranormal elements (e.g., ESP, being out-of-body), and transcendental elements (e.g., unearthly realms, mystical entities). Many scholars have offered hypotheses for these experiences that could provide an explanation that fits the traditional, materialist view of the world (e.g., lack of oxygen, drug interactions). I/we are open to any explanation that provides answers to what’s causing near-death experiences.
To date, none of these alternative explanations has adequately addressed many of the observed phenomena associated with the experience. For example, research shows that near-death experiences can occur without a lack of oxygen, and other work shows that people who have near-death experiences have oxygen levels the same as, or even higher than, those who do not have an experience. Similar findings exist about the claim that near-death experiences are caused by drugs administered during the experience. This hypothesis, of course, ignores the many near-death experiences reported by people who were not being treated by medical professionals at the time of their experiences. Moreover, research shows that when drugs are provided to people in medical situations, they are less likely to report a near-death experience.
As astounding as these sorts of claims are, the one thing that always moves me about these experiences is the lasting effect they have on people. When you train to become a psychologist, you’re likely to be presented with this general adage: In the absence of any other meaningful information, the best predictor of future behavior in a person is their past behavior. Put another way by the great American poet/songwriter Paul Simon, “After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same.” All of this is to say that human personality and identity stay fairly constant through a lifetime.
At DOPS, we are open to all possible answers to those questions.
One common reason provided by therapists who burn out of their career is their frustration with clients not committing to the change required to make them better. This is not the case with many near-death experiencers. The changes observed in these individuals are often adaptive, healthy, and focused on relationships and self-enhancement, and the changes persist! This is not a New Year’s resolution–style of change that lasts a few months. For experiencers, this becomes an ongoing lifelong evaluative process of growth and change after having “learned” some important truths about their existence and even about the universe. Simply put, it’s remarkable.
When I had the opportunity to leave England for a job at DOPS (in late 2023), I was sure that my past work involving lessons from near-death experiencers would be the main thrust of my role. I quickly learned that I was meant to take on a different line of research, with the expectation of carrying on the work of our previous research director, Dr. Jim Tucker. To be frank, I was not familiar with this line of research. It explores cases of young children who seem to be expressing memories of a past life, and it is actually the project that started DOPS back in the 1960s, driven by the efforts of Dr. Stevenson.
Today, my colleague, Dr. Marieta Pehlivanova, and I follow the great tradition of rigor and deliberation set by Drs. Stevenson and Tucker. If you are unfamiliar with this research, it’s fascinating. Typically, children between the ages of two and three start talking, spontaneously, about how they had lived a life before this one. They will sometimes say names of people they knew, or even their own name from that past life, and what they did for a job, and where they lived. We have a database of more than 2,200 cases investigated dating back to the beginning of DOPS, and I can tell you that 61 percent of these children recall how they died in their past life, with 75 percent of those children claiming an unnatural, often traumatic death. In fact, many of the children in our database provided so much detail in their “memories” that 70 percent of investigated cases have been “solved,” meaning that they led to the identification of a specific deceased person whose life appears to match the child’s memories.
There are astounding cases where children have birthmarks and birth defects that match the often fatal blow or accident that their purported past-life person experienced, a fact even supported in some cases by autopsy reports. For the interested reader, here is a sampling of these research reports:
Impact of Children’s Purported Past-Life Memories: A Follow-Up Investigation of American Cases
What Do the Cases of the Reincarnation Type Tell Us About the Mind Beyond the Brain?
There are so many more interesting details and findings from this research that would take too much space for this essay, but I do hope you explore it!
Extraordinary Connections
There is one last bit on these two examples of extraordinary human experience, near-death experiences and past-life memories in children, that I’d like to detail. That is the overlap in content. Some of the children studied over the past six decades have talked about memories not just from a purported past life, but also from the period of time between lives, which we call “intermission” memories.
Many near-death experiencers speak about visiting other realms, beyond Earth. Similarly, many intermission memories in children mention being in a place uniquely and qualitatively different from Earth (e.g., heaven). There are even some intermission reports from children, although rare, of passing through a tunnel, seeing a light, and reviewing their life, all classic features of near-death experiences.
Although these children are less verbose than adults who have had a near-death experience (they are often only two to four years of age!), they do say many of the same things as the adults. Many near-death experiencers will talk about coming to understand that they chose the life they’re currently living. This is reflected in numerous intermission reports from children who speak of choosing their mother. One of our favorites is a child who said, “I picked my mommy out of a basket of mommies.” To me, this overlap of reports from “the other side,” as documented in these two distinct experiences, is compelling, and it speaks, potentially, to some underlying reality of consciousness outside of the physical realm.
Where I Am Now
My long journey from a nine-year-old interested in the possibility of an afterlife, to those sleepless nights in college wrestling with nothingness, also took me to Los Angeles as a writer and producer for NBC News, and then to Minnesota for my PhD in psychology, and then to England as a faculty member at the University of Essex, and now back to America as an associate professor of research within DOPS at the University of Virginia. It’s been quite a journey.
At DOPS today, we are venturing into unexplored territory, even more so than usual. I am currently a co-principal investigator (along with Dr. Marieta Pehlivanova) on a $750,000 research project collaboratively funded by the BIAL Foundation, the Dreamery Foundation, the Philip B. Rothenberg Research Fund, and the TMT Foundation. This ambitious project will be the first of its kind by employing state-of-the-art neuroimaging and contemporary research methodologies to explore why certain children report memories of past lives. This represents an evolution from DOPS’s traditional case study approach to a process-oriented strategy that may reveal underlying mechanisms of these extraordinary experiences. We even have a vision of including, in the future, techniques from epigenetics and genomic studies to make more sense of these remarkable reincarnation-type cases. Hopefully, funding will be available for that!
I remain energized by these extraordinary experiences and by the questions they spark. At DOPS, we are open to all possible answers to those questions. After all this time and after all of this effort, I still don’t know what it all means. I assume I won’t gain that sort of insight while I’m alive on this plane of existence, and that’s okay. What I do think, after all the evidence I’ve seen, over many decades and numerous cultures, is that my college concern of nothingness was flawed. Given all of the reports from all of the experiencers I’ve seen, I have concluded that the “nothingness hypothesis” is illogical. The “how?” and the “why?” remain unclear to me, but I can live with that. Perhaps more important, unlike back in college, I can sleep well knowing that.
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Great read. I’ve had 4NDE myself. One was 12 min no oxygen and 90 min no pulse where I met god and had a tour where he answered all the questions I ever had. As a lifelong truth seeker I know my mission to understand love and truth literally brought me to death and by far all my death experiences have been my favorite aspect of life !
Acorn theory!