Verified by Eccentric's Corner: Queen of Consciousness
Susan Blackmore turns cognitive science into an extreme sport.
By Hara Estroff Marano published January 6, 2015 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016
You’d notice Susan Blackmore even if she didn’t have multicolored hair. Gutsy, skeptical, and fiercely independent, the British psychologist lives “out loud” as a frequent media commentator. She describes herself as having “worked at the fringes of respectable scientific topics without grants and usually without a job.” Yet few embody the sheer spirit of science as she does. She vows such fidelity to evidence that when her decades of searching for paranormal phenomena yielded nothing, she had no qualms about renouncing her longstanding beliefs. Yet her mind is open. And that, she swears, is the toughest job of all.
You’ve been the subject of many of your own experiments, including taking mind-altering drugs. What did you get out of it?
I had an incredible out-of-body experience in 1970, in my first term at Oxford, and set out to be a parapsychologist. After a long time I realized I was chasing something that doesn’t exist. But I still had to understand the experience I’d had. So I began to study strange experiences rather than continue looking for telepathy and clairvoyance and stuff like that.
What kinds of strange experience?
Sleep paralysis, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, visions and hallucinations of various kinds—experiences people felt were on the boundary between reality and imagination. I deliberately took ketamine because it was claimed to produce something like an out-of-body experience. It was a fascinating exploration, but not one I’d like to repeat. The major hallucinogens are extraordinary tools for stripping your mind bare and showing you things that are normally not seen and dislodging your sense of self. That is not for everybody.
What other mind-altering experiences did you attempt?
On a much simpler level there is cannabis; it’s not the hallucinations that are interesting but the change in your state of mind. It can put you into states reminiscent of meditation. It’s not a replacement for meditation; it’s a kind of cheating. There are a lot of questions I’d much rather learn from meditation.
Like what?
Disrupting your sense of self. One odd and interesting state you can reach through meditation is the feeling that stuff is just happening. It’s not happening to “me,” and it’s not happening in the normal sense of time and space, but it’s still happening. You can also get that with drugs, but it’s never as clear.
Why do you prefer to make the effort rather than “cheat” with drugs?
Meditation wears away at one’s sense of separateness and self. I feel as if I am in my head here looking out; I am this mental thing that is different from the physical world out there. This duality is a delusion. Meditation eats away at that, so that you live less self-centeredly and more “this world is me, these other people are me.” You see everything as arising from the conditions of the world, rather than from souls, spirits, little selves, people who are bad and deserve to go to hell.
But people are constantly questing for their “true” self and authenticity.
Science is increasingly telling us that there’s nobody in there. All the jobs that we’re doing that we thought were “me” are done by different bits of the brain: decision making, choices, motor control. There’s no middle of the brain where “I” sit and take in information and hand out the orders; the brain is not organized like that. The most interesting question becomes, why are we so deluded into imagining our selves as something separate that controls our brain?
Why are we?
I do not have a good answer. It may be the simplest way the brain can organize what it’s doing. We’ve got one mouth to speak with, one pair of legs, one pair of hands. All the massive parallel processes going on in each part of the brain have to result in one output. You could say that the brain just has to tell a simpler story than all the complicated stuff going on. That is true only of an animal with the language and kind of complexity we have. My cat is not deluded.
You are the mother of a daughter, Emily Troscianko, who had severe anorexia and wrote about it for PT. Did that ordeal give you any insight into parenting?
Not much. Life was very difficult with an anorexic in the house. But it was probably good that I had my own life, was absorbed in questions of consciousness, and wanted to write my books. I talked to other parents whose lives were basically wrecked by their child’s anorexia. They had given up work, they were doing everything they could to try to make their child eat, and as far as I could see, none of it helped.
Why the multicolored hair?
Way back when I was working on perception in Bristol, there was a well-known vision scientist who had multicolored hair, and I thought I’d like to be like that. When my hair was starting to go seriously gray, I didn’t want to dye it brown and pretend to be younger. So what else do you do if you don’t like your gray hair very much?
It’s your signature?
Yes, it is. I don’t know why. But I’ve always been a very obvious person, ever since I was a kid; never in my life have I been able to walk into a room and not be noticed.
What else is on your mind these days?
My theories about genes, memes, and tremes, which are self-propagating, technology-based memes. We seem to be oblivious to the fact that by constructing all these computers and servers and web and cloud, we are unwittingly letting loose a self-organizing global artificial intelligence that is growing, and we are willingly being sucked into it.
How are we being sucked in?
Because we want things like Skype and Facebook and email. And drones with cameras. I can just ask a question and, boom, the answer comes back from somewhere. Where is it coming from? A massive distributive system out there, which in hardware terms consists of countless computers, phones, servers, wires, and satellites; the whole thing is analogous to a brain, a massive information-processing system, all linked up, not in rational ways but linked up. We want these things.
Yes, Steve Jobs made a little piece of aluminum irresistible. It has feedback and reward systems that keep people engaged whether they need to be or not.
Digital information in machinery has a drive of its own to propagate itself. The fact that we are so easily trapped into spending hours and hours playing computer games or dealing with email is contributing to producing more and more hardware in which this creature thrives.
What is the danger from tremes?
This third evolutionary process (after genes and memes), the capacity for digital information to copy itself and incorporate variation and selection without us, which we’ve let loose, is going very fast. Evolutionary processes tend to speed up because they have more variation to work with. It’s drawing us to build the machinery faster, and all this machinery uses a hell of a lot of power. Google, for example, is moving its servers next to hydroelectric power. We want Google to tell us what we want to know right now, and that means digging up more oil, more coal, fracking, putting more carbon into the atmosphere. The other consequence: What is our role in the great treme machines?
We’ve abdicated our role.
We’ve sort of let slip our control. I compare what’s happening with the theory of endosymbiosis put forth by Lynn Margulis, in which the mitochondria, which power the cells, were originally free-floating bacteria that were absorbed into the cells, and both benefited. I propose that that is what is going on with us. We are being absorbed into this thing as its power producers—becoming the mitochondria for the great machine. We are giving up our independence, and control over ourselves, our children, our relationships, and the planet, without realizing what we’re doing.
Do you think there will be a backlash, or is the digital world just too compelling?
I think it’s too compelling. We are doing it willingly and changing ourselves in the process. Our amazing brainpower is now used not for basic skills of survival but for much more exciting stuff like manipulating incredibly amazing machines, manipulating images, enjoying things. We are getting used to extraordinary amounts of stimulation. But it is changing who we are. We seem to be becoming more anxious and more depressed, and brain overload has a lot to do with that.
