Susan Blackmore is one of Britain’s best-known media skeptics. A CSICOP Fellow, she was awarded the CSICOP Distinguished Skeptic Award in 1991.

Blackmore started her career by doing research in parapsychology, but has announced on several occasions that she has left the field of parapsychology to devote herself to the study of memes, as proposed by the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins.

Despite her repeated departures from the field, she keeps reappearing, and her recent research into belief in the paranormal has been funded by the Perrott-Warrick Fund, a Cambridge-based endowment for promoting psychical research.

She has written several books, including Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out-of-the Body Experiences (1982) and Dying to Live (1993). She herself has had an out-of-the-body experience, but explains her own experience and those of others as an illusion caused by anoxia in the brain [a discussion of disproof of this and other theories based on materialistic models by scientific researchers].

Blackmore’s controversial bestseller The Meme Machine was published in 1999. Her most recent book is Consciousness – An Introduction, published in 2003.

Blackmore combines her skeptical beliefs with the practice of Zen Buddhism. She used to teach at the University of the West of England in Bristol, but left in October 2001 to pursue a freelance career in the media.

More Information

Review of Dying to Live
by Greg Stone, Near-Death.com

A Critical Examination of the Blackmore Psi Experiments
by Rick E. Berger, Science Unlimited Research Foundation, San Antonio, Texas. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol 83, April 1989, 123-144.