Susan Blackmore
29/7/19
Susan Blackmore is a writer, lecturer, broadcaster and visiting professor as the University of Plymouth. She is best known for her 2000 book The Meme Machine where she attempts to constitute memetics as a science by discussing its empirical and analytic potential. In 1980, she earned a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Surrey and later conducted psychokinesis experiments to see if her baby daughter could influence a random number generator. She ran the Oxford University Society for Psychical Research, and after a vivid out-of-body experience spent some time researching parapsychology and the paranormal.
Of her OBE she wrote: "the dramatic out-of-body experience convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena—only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a skeptic."
She is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and in 1991, was awarded the CSICOP Distinguished Skeptic Award. Susan was one of the Psychologists connected to The UK Big brother TV show and is a patron of Humanists UK. She has spoken at many skeptic conferences and has been a consulting editor of the Skeptical Inquirer since 1998. Happy Birthday Susan Blackmore.