Discovery Lab Answers

Erlendur Haraldsson — Experiments and Data

Erlendur Haraldsson is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Iceland ^[1][2], where his research spans several interconnected areas: past-life memory claims in children and adults, deathbed and afterlife-encounter phenomena, and historical mediumship cases. The sources retrieved for this question cover a cross-section of his empirical and review work.

Past-Life Memory Research

One of Haraldsson’s sustained research programs concerns children who claim memories of a previous life — a methodology pioneered by Ian Stevenson, whose legacy Haraldsson explicitly situates himself within ^[1].

Persistence of past-life memories into adulthood ^[6] is the focus of a study in which Haraldsson interviewed 42 adults, aged 19 to 49, who had made past-life memory claims in childhood. The study examined what those memories consisted of and how they were retained over time. Among what subjects reported remembering most clearly: persons they knew, how they died, and what they used to do in the claimed prior life ^[6]. Haraldsson also found, comparing across two earlier studies, that children with past-life memories remembered significantly more of the content of a short story read to them than peers without such claims did — a result first reported in 1997, with a trend in the same direction in a 2000 follow-up, though Haraldsson notes that how much childhood memory persists into adulthood depends heavily on the type of memory being examined ^[6].

Historical Mediumship and “Remote Viewing” Cases

Haraldsson co-authored (with Johan L. F. Gerding of Leiden University) a comparative historical analysis of two accounts that bear resemblance to what would now be called remote viewing ^[5]:

• Indridi Indridason, an Icelandic medium from the early twentieth century, reportedly described a fire in Copenhagen during a séance sitting — details that Haraldsson and Gerding examined against contemporaneous Minute Books of the Experimental Society founded to investigate Indridason’s mediumship. Those Minute Books had been lost for decades; two resurfaced after Gissurarson and Haraldsson’s 1989 monograph on Indridason and were incorporated into this analysis ^[5].
• Emanuel Swedenborg‘s reported Stockholm fire vision was examined in parallel, with Haraldsson and Gerding tracing documentary records including shipping logs to assess the chronology of Swedenborg’s movements ^[5].

The paper does not claim these cases constitute controlled experimental evidence; it is a historical-documentary analysis assessing the coherence and timing of the reports against archival sources.

Afterlife and Deathbed Encounter Research

Haraldsson’s 2012 book The Departed among the Living — cited in his own review of Callum Cooper’s work — represents his investigative program on afterlife encounters ^[3]. In his review of Raymond Moody’s Glimpses of Eternity, Haraldsson reflects on his own methodological position: he notes the tension between scientific skepticism and the phenomenological richness of the case material, describing a deliberate decision to engage with the experiential content of deathbed cases on its own terms before applying critical analysis ^[4]. That is a methodological stance rather than a data claim, but it is relevant context for reading his empirical reports in this area.

In reviewing Cooper’s telephone-calls-from-the-dead study, Haraldsson recounts a personal incident — a phone call attributed to a recently deceased acquaintance, heard by his wife — while framing it as an example of the category of phenomena Cooper investigates ^[3]. He uses this as contextual framing, not as data.

Positioning Within the Field

Across these sources, Haraldsson consistently identifies as working within the Stevensonian tradition of systematic case investigation — interviewing witnesses, seeking corroborating documentation, and comparing findings across cultures — while also engaging with controlled experimental designs in his memory studies ^[6]. His affiliation throughout is the Department of Psychology, University of Iceland ^[4][5].

Skeptical Critiques

What critics argue. The methodology underlying past-life memory research — including Haraldsson’s — has been critiqued on several grounds: that informants may unconsciously or consciously provide information that fits a known local deceased person after learning the claimed identity (the “person-object identification” problem), that investigators may inadvertently cue subjects during interviews, and that cultural expectation shapes both what children report and how families interpret it. These are structural critiques of the case-study method, not specific to Haraldsson alone, but they bear on how much weight to place on interview-derived data.

What the experimental data show. Haraldsson’s memory study ^[6] attempts a partial experimental component by comparing story-recall performance between children with and without past-life memory claims — an approach designed to look for a cognitive correlate independent of the content of the claims themselves. The finding of significantly better story recall among past-life claimants in the 1997 study, with a trend in the same direction in 2000, represents an attempt to move beyond purely narrative case material. However, the retrieved excerpts do not contain the statistical details of those comparisons; the reader should consult those studies directly for the figures.

Analysis. The historical mediumship analyses ^[5] are archival rather than experimental, and their evidential weight depends on the completeness and reliability of century-old documents — a limitation Haraldsson acknowledges implicitly by noting which records were missing or partially recovered. Independent replication of the case-investigation method by researchers outside Haraldsson’s own group has occurred within the Stevensonian tradition broadly (Tucker, cited in ^[2]), but the specific cases Haraldsson investigated are not independently reinvestigated in the sources retrieved here.

For broader context on the mediumship cases Haraldsson documented, including the Indridason material, the Rosemarie Pilkington page covers Pilkington’s review of the Haraldsson and Gissurarson monograph and situates Indridason within the RSPK and physical mediumship literature. The ESP-Nexus Studies section indexes individual study-audit pages where quantitative claims receive the full four-vendor audit treatment.