Susan Blackmore

Dr. Susan Jane Blackmore (born 1949) is a British freelance writer, lecturer, and broadcaster, perhaps best known for her book The Meme Machine.

Career

In 1973, Susan Blackmore graduated from St. Hilda's College, University of Oxford, with a BA (Hons) in psychology and physiology. She went on to do a postgraduate degree in environmental psychology at the University of Surrey, achieving an MSc in 1974. In 1980, she got her Ph.D. in parapsychology from the same university, her thesis being entitled "Extrasensory Perception as a Cognitive Process".

She has done research on memes (which she wrote about in her popular book The Meme Machine), evolutionary theory, consciousness, and the paranormal.

She has also appeared on television a number of times, discussing such paranormal phenomena as ghosts, ESP, and out-of-body experiences, in what she describes as the "unenviable role of Rentaskeptic", and she has also presented a show on alien abductions. Another programme which she has presented discusses the intelligence of apes. She also acted as one of the psychologists who featured on the British version of the television show "Big Brother", speaking about the psychological state of the contestants.

She has been on the editorial board for the Journal of Memetics (an electronic journal ) since 1997, and has been a consulting editor of the Skeptical Inquirer since 1998.

Her latest book, Consciousness: An Introduction (2004), is the first book that could be described as an introductory textbook to the entire field of consciousness studies. In it she covers a wide variety of topics such as the mind-body problem, the hard problem of consciousness, philosophy of mind, Cognitive neuropsychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, evolution, parapsychology, altered states of consciousness, phenomenology, Buddhism, and meditation. In sidebars she has written brief profiles various notable contributors to the field such as Daniel Dennett, John Searle, David Chalmers, Patricia Churchland, Francis Crick, Antonio Damasio, V.S. Ramachandran, John Carew Eccles, Rodney Brooks, Alan Turing, Francisco Varela, Rene Descartes, David Hume, William James, and the Buddha.

Personal life

In 1977, she married fellow academic Prof. Tom Troscianko , and they had two children: Emily Tamarisk Troscianko (born February 20, 1982), and Jolyon Tomasz Troscianko (born May 17, 1984).

She is now the partner of Dr. Adam Hart-Davis.

Blackmore is an active practitioner of Zen, although she identifies herself as "not a Buddhist".[1]

Blackmore is an atheist who has written against religion:

I want to tell that these religious memes not survived for hundreds of years because they are true, or because they are useful for genes, or because they make us happy. I believe that they are false in fact, and they are causes of the most terrible distresses of the human history. Not - they survived because they are selfish memes (Awakening from the meme dream).

External links

• Susan Blackmore's website
• Brief description of Susan Blackmore
• Susan Blackmore's CV