About

Jesse Bering is an award-winning science writer specializing in evolutionary psychology and human behaviour.

He is the author of several acclaimed popular books, and he and his work have been featured on numerous documentaries, television shows and radio programmes, including ‘Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman’, ‘Conan’, ‘Chelsea Lately’, ‘Q&A’ (Australia), NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ and the BBC.

He has written for Slate, Guardian, The New York Times, Discover, Chicago Tribune, New Republic, Vice and many others. Several of his science-writing projects have sold for option rights to major US television and film producers, and his ‘Bering in Mind’ column at Scientific American was nominated for a 2010 Webby Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

An experimental psychologist by training, he spent his early career researching the cognitive science of religion, and has published extensively in that field. Formerly director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast, and a professor at the University of Arkansas, he is currently Professor of Psychology and Head of the Science Communication Programme at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Photo by Guy Frederick

"Bering's book kept me hooked like a good novel does. Is there an afterlife or not? You need to keep turning the pages to find out, and Bering does a great job of keeping you on the fence. He does so effectively because he is a cautious, skeptical scientist writing about Ian Stevenson - another cautious, skeptical scientist. Well done!"

Robert Epstein, Ph.D., Senior Research Psychologist, American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology

“Jesse Bering is a brilliant psychologist, a gifted storyteller, a careful reader of Jean-Paul Sartre, and a very funny man. And his first book, The Belief Instinct, is a triumph—a moving, provocative, and entertaining exploration of the human search for meaning.”

Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology, Yale University, author of How Pleasure Works

“Bravo! This deeply researched and engagingly written biography does much more than tell the story of Ian Stevenson’s life and work on children with past-life memories, mediumship, apparitions, and extrasensory perception—it is a meditation on the implications of Stevenson’s findings for the relation of mind to body and the survival of consciousness after bodily death. Bering’s account is especially powerful because he comes to Stevenson from the perspective of cognitive psychology. It should inspire others who think they know what Stevenson was about, but have not read anything he wrote, to take up his extensive writings and form their own opinions about them.”

James G. Matlock, author of “Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory”

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About

Jesse is a professor of psychology and Head of the Science Communication Programme at the University of Otago.
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