Susan Blackmore Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Susan Jane Blackmore was born on July 29, 1951, in England into a cultivated, intellectually ambitious family. Her father was a physician and her mother a writer, and the household combined scientific seriousness with literary ease. That mixture mattered. Blackmore grew up in postwar Britain as psychology, cybernetics, evolutionary theory, and popular interest in altered consciousness were all entering public conversation. From early on she showed the two traits that would define her public life: appetite for radical questions and refusal to leave them in the realm of mystique. She would become known as a writer, broadcaster, and psychologist, but the deepest continuity in her life was a relentless attempt to understand mind without comforting illusions.

Her career was also shaped by a biographical tension that never entirely disappeared - the pull between extraordinary experience and skeptical explanation. As a young woman she underwent an out-of-body experience that shook her assumptions and drew her toward psychical research. Rather than treating that episode as a private marvel, she made it a research problem. This was the beginning of the pattern that made her unusual in British intellectual life: she often entered controversial territories from the inside, took them seriously enough to study them, and then, if evidence failed, abandoned cherished ideas in public. That willingness to revise herself gave her work both its severity and its drama.

Education and Formative Influences

Blackmore studied psychology and physiology at St Hilda's College, Oxford, graduating in the early 1970s, and later completed a PhD in parapsychology at the University of Surrey. Oxford gave her formal training in experimental method at a time when psychology was divided between behaviorism, cognitive science, and more speculative accounts of consciousness. The counterculture also mattered: the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraged serious curiosity about meditation, psychedelics, mystical states, and psychic claims. Blackmore did not merely consume those currents; she tested them. Her early commitment to parapsychology was genuine, but years of failed attempts to produce robust evidence for psi transformed her into one of the most visible skeptics of paranormal claims. At the same time, the rise of Richard Dawkins's evolutionary thinking, especially the meme idea introduced in The Selfish Gene, gave her a framework for explaining culture, imitation, and even the self as products of replication rather than essence.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Blackmore taught psychology and became a prolific public intellectual through books, lectures, debates, and media appearances. Her early major book, The Adventures of a Parapsychologist, documented both fascination with and disillusionment about psychic research. The turning point was not a single conversion scene but an accumulation of null results, methodological doubts, and a growing conviction that anomalous experiences could be studied naturalistically. She went on to write Dying to Live, a careful examination of near-death experiences; Consciousness: An Introduction, a widely used textbook that mapped competing theories of mind; and The Meme Machine, the work most closely associated with her name, in which she developed memetics into a broader account of cultural evolution. Later, in Conversations on Consciousness and other writings, she interviewed leading scientists and philosophers while advancing her own "no-self" view. Across these works she moved from fringe inquiry to mainstream debate, becoming a familiar British voice on consciousness, free will, meditation, evolution, and the future of human and machine intelligence.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Blackmore's central theme is that the self feels real without being a stable inner entity. Drawing on cognitive science, meditation, and evolutionary theory, she argues that consciousness is not governed by a little person inside the head but by distributed processes, habits of attention, and narratives generated after the fact. This made her both provocative and unusually hard to categorize. She could write sympathetically about mystical states while denying supernatural explanations; she could treat meditation as transformative while refusing to romanticize it. Her prose is brisk, lucid, and adversarial in the best sense - impatient with vagueness, but drawn to big questions. A lifelong interest in Zen and in the phenomenology of consciousness sharpened her view that what people call "I" is often an afterimage of mental activity rather than its source.

In memetics she found a language for cultural contagion that matched her anti-essentialist instincts. She insisted that memes should not be treated as a decorative analogy to genetics: “One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator”. That formulation reveals her intellectual psychology - she was drawn not to metaphor but to explanatory machinery. At the same time she resisted totalizing theories: “Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic”. Even when discussing sexual selection and human strategy - “Take male strategies for success in the world. If you've got all the advantages, if you're attractive and clever and all of that, you will generally go for very high quality females”. - her purpose was not cynicism but demystification, an attempt to see human motives as evolved, patterned, and often less noble than self-description suggests.

Legacy and Influence

Blackmore's legacy lies in the rare combination of skepticism, experiential curiosity, and theoretical ambition. She helped normalize rigorous discussion of near-death experiences and out-of-body states without endorsing the paranormal; she gave memetics one of its most forceful and accessible expositions; and she became a leading explainer of consciousness for general readers. In British intellectual culture she occupies a distinctive place beside scientists and philosophers who made complexity public, but her path was more self-revising than most. Admirers value her honesty in changing her mind; critics dispute memetics, her strong anti-self claims, or her reductionism. Yet even criticism confirms her influence: she forced debates about mind, culture, and identity into sharper form. For readers encountering her first as a writer, what endures is the tone - fearless, unsentimental, and fascinated by the possibility that some of our deepest certainties are stories minds tell themselves.