Susan Blackmore
Psychologist, Writer & Lecturer · b. 1951
Susan Blackmore is the rare researcher whose name became known precisely because she changed her mind. As an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1970s, she had an intense out-of-body experience and concluded that something paranormal was happening. She spent the next two decades looking for it — running rigorous experiments on telepathy, precognition, and survival of consciousness after death.
She did not find what she was looking for. Around 1990, after years of consistently null results in her own lab and a careful look at the wider literature, she publicly broke with parapsychology and announced that she no longer believed psychic phenomena were real. The transition cost her professional relationships but established her as one of the most intellectually honest figures in the modern skeptic movement.
Since then, Blackmore has done two things. The first is The Meme Machine(1999), a book that extended Richard Dawkins’s concept of the meme into a sweeping theory of how human culture — including religion — evolves through differential copying rather than divine inspiration. The second is the science of consciousness, where she writes and teaches with unusual willingness to follow the data into uncomfortable places — including the conclusion that the unified “self” is a useful illusion.
Consciousness without a soul
Blackmore is one of the most influential popular writers on consciousness. Her position: the felt sense of being a unified 'I' watching experience from behind the eyes is a confabulation — not a soul, not a homunculus, but a story the brain produces. She holds this view rigorously, applying it even to her own moment-to-moment experience.
Memetics as cultural natural selection
In The Meme Machine she develops Richard Dawkins' concept of the meme into a full theory: ideas, songs, religions, and technologies are replicators competing for human attention, and what survives is what is good at being copied, not what is true or useful. Religions, on this view, are unusually successful memeplexes.
Paranormal claims fail when tested
Blackmore began her career as a believer in psychic phenomena and spent over twenty years running careful experiments looking for evidence. She found none, and changed her mind. Her published reversal is one of the clearest case studies in scientific honesty in the modern skeptic literature.
Out-of-body and near-death experiences are explicable
Her work shows that the classic NDE features — tunnel of light, life review, sense of peace, leaving the body — map onto known patterns of brain activity under low oxygen, neurotransmitter release, and disrupted body-mapping. They are real experiences with natural causes.
I gave up the paranormal because it didn't work. The experiments kept coming up null. After twenty years, the honest thing to do was to say so — and to follow the evidence wherever it actually led, including into the uncomfortable question of why I had believed it in the first place.
Memetics and the success of religion
Blackmore’s contribution to atheism is less polemical than analytical. The Meme Machineargues that religions are extremely well-adapted “memeplexes” — bundles of ideas that propagate not because they are true but because they happen to push the right human buttons: explanations for death, social glue, transcendent reward, fear of punishment, and a built-in command to spread the message. Once you see the pattern, you stop being puzzled by religion’s persistence in a world that ought, on naive grounds, to have outgrown it.
Essential books
Best quotes
“I converted from belief in the paranormal to the conviction that it was all nonsense — and I did so on the basis of evidence.”
“Memes are the new replicators. They are the cultural equivalent of genes — and they evolve by the same logic.”
“The self is a story the brain tells itself. There is no inner observer, no soul behind the eyes, no little person watching the show.”
“It is far more interesting to find out how something actually works than to believe a comforting fiction about it.”
“If religion were true, we would expect believers to be measurably better off — kinder, happier, more honest. The evidence does not show this.”
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Cognitive science of religion
Why human brains generate religious belief — the field her work shaped.
Consciousness and the soul
The argument that mind requires the supernatural — and why it fails.
Women and atheism
More female freethinkers shaping the conversation.
Why people believe
The psychology and natural history of religious belief.