Susan Blackmore

Set out in 1970 to prove psi was real, spent twenty-five years failing, and wrote the most useful account anyone has given of what that feels like from the inside.

Who they were

Susan Blackmore (born 1951), British psychologist, formerly of the University of the West of England, best known now for work on consciousness, memetics and the sense of self — and before that for a quarter-century inside parapsychology as a believer who could not make the results come out.

Where they came from

As an undergraduate at Oxford in 1970, reading physiology and psychology, she had an out-of-body experience lasting several hours — vivid, transformative, and entirely convincing at the time. She describes it as the reason for everything that followed.

She took a PhD in parapsychology, expecting to demonstrate the phenomena she was sure she had experienced. She ran experiments on telepathy in schoolchildren, on remote viewing, on ganzfeld designs, on twins, on the tarot, on astrology.

The results were consistently null.

She spent years assuming she had made a mistake — tightening designs, changing populations, trying new paradigms. She also went looking for errors in her own earlier work and found some, and published the corrections. When she began investigating others' positive results, she found errors there too, and said so, which cost her friendships in a small field.

By the mid-1980s her position had shifted, and by the 1990s she had left parapsychology altogether, saying she had given it twenty-five years and had nothing to show.

What they taught

Two things, of which the second is the more valuable.

On out-of-body experiences, her book Beyond the Body (1982) remains a standard reference. Her account — that these are constructions of the brain's body model, not departures from it — was proposed well before Blanke's and Ehrsson's laboratory inductions confirmed the general shape of it, and she has the rare distinction of having proposed a naturalistic explanation for her own most profound experience and then watching it be vindicated.

On the psychology of belief and disbelief, she wrote openly about what it is like to be the person whose experiments do not work. She describes the temptation to keep going, the ease of finding reasons why this particular study failed, the way a field sustains itself on the studies that worked, and the difficulty of admitting that the thing that shaped your life was not what you thought it was.

She has been equally direct about the cost of changing her mind in public, and about the fact that the experience itself never stopped being real to her.

What we can and cannot say

We can say she is the best available witness on this territory, precisely because she is not a professional debunker who arrived with the conclusion. She wanted it to be true, worked hard for it, and reported what she found.

We can say her critics have a point worth stating. Proponents argue she is an example of the experimenter effect the field claims to observe — that psi does not appear for investigators who come to expect nothing. That is either an important phenomenon or an unfalsifiable defence, and which of the two it is has never been settled. Blackmore's own response was that a phenomenon which declines to appear for sceptics is indistinguishable from one that is not there.

We can say her later work stands independently. The Meme Machine (1999), her writing on the illusory nature of the continuous self, her introductions to consciousness studies, and her long practice of Zen — she has never stopped meditating — are the work of someone still interested in the same underlying question, approached differently.

And we can say the honest shape of her career is the point. She had an experience that would have made most people believers for life, took it seriously enough to test it properly, accepted the answer, and kept the experience. That combination is rare in either direction, and it is a better model than anything else this section can offer.

We cannot say she was right about psi. What we can say is that she is the only major figure in the field who spent twenty-five years trying to prove it and then told everyone exactly what happened.

Who they were

Where they came from

What they taught

What we can and cannot say

Further reading