Professor Tucker said: “We have now studied over 2,500 cases around the world. They are easiest to find in cultures with a belief in reincarnation.
“But they have been found wherever anyone has looked for them. They have been found on all the continents, except Antarctica.
“They typically involve very young children who spontaneously start talking about a past life and a recent ordinary life.
“These kids are not claiming to be Cleopatra or Julius Caesar or anything like that. Just describing somebody who lived and died.
“The one part of the life that’s often out of the ordinary is how the previous person died.”
In about 70 percent of all the case studies, the “previous person” supposedly died by unnatural means.
According to Professor Tucker, these unusual deaths included murder, accidents and even death by suicide.
Professor Tucker said: “Often in most cases that we’ve investigated, the kids give enough details so that people have been able to confirm that somebody did actually live and die whose life matches the details that the child gave.”
The psychiatrist also said the children would often demonstrate “emotional or behavioural features” seemingly connected to their stories of a past life.
Even more bizarrely, some children were born with birthmarks matching the placement of fatal wounds from their “past lives”.
Professor Tucker then said researchers investigated similar cases in the US and came to the conclusion tales of a past life are not unique to any particular cultural phenomenon.
At the end of the presentation, during a Q&A session with the audience, the psychiatrist said most children stop talking about these memories when they turn six or seven.
