Susan Blackmore Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Susan Jane Blackmore was born in 1951 in England. From an early age she was fascinated by how minds work, a curiosity that led her to study psychology and physiology at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford. As an undergraduate she immersed herself in experimental methods and debates about perception and consciousness, laying the groundwork for a career that would move between laboratory research, philosophical argument, and public engagement. After Oxford she pursued postgraduate work at the University of Surrey, where she began formal research on topics at the fringes of mainstream psychology and eventually completed a doctorate focused on parapsychology.

A Pivotal Experience and the Turn to Parapsychology
A widely discussed turning point arrived while she was a student: she had a striking out-of-body experience. Instead of treating it as evidence of the paranormal, she tried to understand it empirically. The experience propelled her into the world of parapsychology, where she joined the Society for Psychical Research and set up controlled tests of telepathy, clairvoyance, and other claims. Blackmore ran experiments using techniques such as ganzfeld procedures and carefully designed controls to guard against bias and error. In these years she read deeply in the literature and engaged with figures who shaped the field, debating evidence and methodology with colleagues who disagreed about whether psi effects were real or illusory.

From Believer to Skeptic
Sustained testing changed her mind. Although she began open to the possibility of paranormal phenomena, her own data and the broader pattern of replication failures convinced her that the evidence did not meet scientific standards. She became a prominent critic of parapsychology while retaining sympathy for the experiences that lead people to believe. This transition brought her into close contact with skeptically minded researchers, including the psychologist Richard Wiseman, whose work on deception and experimental design helped clarify how false positives can arise, and with public advocates for scientific skepticism such as James Randi. She continued to investigate extraordinary experiences, turning to naturalistic models of memory, attention, and neural representation. Her books on near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences argued that the most compelling accounts can be understood without invoking non-physical explanations.

Memes and Cultural Evolution
Blackmore reached a wide audience with her work on memetics. Influenced by Richard Dawkins's concept of the meme as a unit of cultural replication, she set out to build a coherent framework for understanding how ideas, technologies, and practices spread and evolve. In The Meme Machine she developed the case that human brains and cultures are shaped by selection among memes, extending evolutionary reasoning from genes to information. Dawkins publicly supported the project, and the philosopher Daniel Dennett, a leading voice in naturalistic theories of mind and evolution, championed her efforts to connect cultural change with selectionist principles. Blackmore later explored the idea that once technology started to copy and recombine information, it launched a further stage of cultural evolution, a proposal she discussed in lectures and interviews alongside scientists and technologists intrigued by self-replicating code and algorithms.

Consciousness Studies and Teaching
Parallel to her work on memetics, Blackmore became a central figure in consciousness studies. She wrote textbooks and essays that introduced students to the hard problem of consciousness, the neural correlates of experience, and empirical research on attention, vision, and selfhood. Consciousness: An Introduction became a widely used course text, notable for its balance of philosophy and neuroscience and its willingness to examine first-person experience without abandoning third-person rigor. Later editions were co-authored with Emily T. Troscianko, bringing an intergenerational perspective to a fast-moving field. Blackmore also authored Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, distilling complex debates for general readers.

She taught and supervised students over many years, notably at the University of the West of England in Bristol, and later served as a visiting professor at the University of Plymouth. Her classrooms and public lectures introduced thousands of students to experimental paradigms in perception and to skeptical inquiry as a habit of mind. She often appeared on panels with philosophers and scientists such as David Chalmers, Nicholas Humphrey, and other contributors to the science of consciousness, where she emphasized methodological clarity and the importance of testing even cherished intuitions.

Zen Practice and Personal Philosophy
A long-standing practitioner of Zen, Blackmore integrated meditation into her intellectual life, arguing that disciplined introspection can inform scientific questions about the self. She trained with teachers in the Western Chan tradition, including the scholar-practitioner John Crook, and participated in retreats that focused on direct investigation of moment-to-moment experience. Her writing developed a theme that runs through both Buddhist psychology and cognitive science: the self may be a constructed narrative rather than a persisting inner entity. Books such as Ten Zen Questions invited readers to examine everyday mental events with the same curiosity she brought to laboratory research.

Public Communication and Media
Beyond academia, Blackmore became known as a clear and spirited communicator. She wrote essays and columns for newspapers and magazines, contributed to radio and television programs, and delivered talks at venues ranging from universities to TED. In these settings she debated proponents of paranormal claims, explained why extraordinary experiences need not imply extraordinary forces, and explored how cultural evolution can illuminate everything from religion to technology. Her exchanges with public intellectuals like Dawkins and Dennett helped situate her ideas within broader conversations about science and society.

Later Research and Interdisciplinary Work
Blackmore continued to examine experiences that once led her toward parapsychology, now informed by advances in neuroscience. In writing about out-of-body states she engaged with research by scientists such as Olaf Blanke, whose experiments showed how multisensory integration can be perturbed to evoke body illusions. She connected such findings with reports from patients and meditators, proposing that unusual experiences reveal ordinary mechanisms of self-modeling and perspective taking. Her later books revisited central questions about what consciousness is, how agency functions, and why minds generate a sense of continuity in the first place.

Collaborations, Influences, and Community
Throughout her career, Blackmore sought out colleagues whose work intersected with her own. With Richard Wiseman she shared an insistence on tight experimental protocols and a sense of humor about human gullibility. With Emily T. Troscianko she updated pedagogical materials for a new generation of students, integrating contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Exchanges with philosophers such as Daniel Dennett sharpened her views on evolution, culture, and the mechanics of selfhood, while conversations with Richard Dawkins linked memetics to broader evolutionary theory. Her Zen connections, especially with John Crook and the Western Chan community, grounded her theoretical claims in lived practice.

Legacy
Susan Blackmore stands out for her willingness to change her mind in public and to show how science can address extraordinary claims without hostility or credulity. She helped normalize the study of consciousness in psychology curricula, provided an accessible entry point to memetics, and modeled a style of inquiry that moves freely between first-person reflection and third-person measurement. The people around her across decades of work, from skeptical investigators like James Randi and Richard Wiseman to evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and contemplatives like John Crook, reflect the breadth of her interests. As a writer, teacher, and researcher, she has offered readers and students tools for thinking critically about the mind, about culture, and about the stories we tell about who we are.

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