The divide between skeptics and believers often seems a gaping chasm, with personal ideology often trumping evidence for both groups. As long-time readers will know, here at the Grail we often champion inhabiting the ‘excluded middle’ – staying in a space where you can entertain strange ideas without becoming emotionally attached to them, and always testing them.
So it was refreshing to hear the thoughts of Professor Jesse Bering when we interviewed him about his 2026 book delving into the life and work of one of the most well-known ‘heretical scientists’ of the past century, The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson: One Scientist’s Epic Quest for Evidence of Reincarnation, Apparitions, Poltergeists, and Other Matters of the Soul. Bering, a psychologist and science communicator who has written a number of books on outre topics – from sexual deviancy to suicide – began his book project as a traditional skeptic, expecting that modern psychology and cognitive science would easily explain away the cases of reincarnation that Ian Stevenson had collected during his decades of research.
“I am a skeptic and I’ve made no secret of that fact,” Bering told us (full interview video embedded below). “I’m trained in cognitive science as an experimentalist, with an evolutionary theoretical background,” giving him insights into mainstream psychological explanations for ‘afterlife’ experiences and beliefs. However, rather than conducting a simple “debunking exercise,” he hoped to use his psychology background to find “areas that psychology could help explain that maybe Ian Stevenson hadn’t been aware of”.
However, once he got deep into the weeds, reading through Stevenson’s voluminous and detailed reports of possible cases of reincarnation, explaining away the data “proved to be a more difficult task than than I anticipated going in,” Bering revealed.
That’s not to say Bering became a full-on believer. But digging into the evidence, and confronting it in a truly open-minded way, certainly changed his thinking on the topic. “Writing this book and this journey kind of moved the needle a little bit,” Bering confessed to us, saying he’s now “maybe a one or a two out of 10” in terms of belief. “I mean, before this I was at the negative end of things in terms of even allowing myself to indulge in the possibility of an afterlife or paranormal phenomena, that sort of thing – so at least I’m on the positive scale now.”
Bering might also have been more open to considering alternative theories due to a number of strange experiences he’s had in his own life – a number of which he relates in his book – which have always rubbed up against his professional scientific training: “I’ve had these weird anomalous personal experiences myself and I’ve never found a comfortable way to marry them, and I still experience that that tension.”
Bering emphasized to us, however, that he still “remains a skeptic” – although his work on this book has significantly altered his willingness to consider the possibility of an afterlife. And, importantly, he now views these topics as a viable area for scientific investigation: “I do see these as legitimate empirical research questions and I think that’s progress as a scientist for me”.
And, ultimately, when I pushed him for a simple yes or no answer as to whether he now agreed with Dr Ian Stevenson’s 1974 assertion that “a rational person if he wants can believe in reincarnation on the basis of the evidence”, Bering paused only very slightly before offering his answer.
“Yes”.
