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In Search of the Light
"True skepticism has nothing to do with disbelief," says Susan Blackmore. "It is about taking people's claims seriously and trying to understand them." As a starry-eyed student, Blackmore was convinced of the reality of astral planes, telepathy, and life after death. She was determined to devote her life to parapsychology, but what she found wasn't what she had bargained for. None of her cleverly devised experiments revealed a hint of the psi she was seeking. In a determined effort to find it somehow, she tested young children in play groups, trained students in imagery and altered states of consciousness, and even put Tarot cards to the test. She visited haunted houses and was regressed to a "past life." Finally, accused of being a "psi-inhibitory experimenter" with the power of abolishing paranormal effects, she visited other, more successful, experimenters. Here she found only errors in their experiments.In this new and updated edition of The Adventures of a Parapsychologist, Blackmore is at last at liberty to explain just what she found in those ill-fated experiments at Cambridge. She brings her story up to date in a lively and personal account of one scientist's never-ending search for the paranormal.
286 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1986
131 people want to read
About the author
Susan Blackmore
32 books311 followersSusan Jane Blackmore is a freelance writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. She has a degree in psychology and physiology from Oxford University (1973) and a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Surrey (1980). Her research interests include memes, evolutionary theory, consciousness, and meditation. She practices Zen and campaigns for drug legalization. Sue Blackmore no longer works on the paranormal.
She writes for several magazines and newspapers, blogs for the Guardian newspaper and Psychology Today, and is a frequent contributor and presenter on radio and television. She is author of over sixty academic articles, about fifty book contributions, and many book reviews. Her books include Dying to Live (on near-death experiences, 1993), In Search of the Light (autobiography, 1996),Test Your Psychic Powers (with Adam Hart-Davis, 1997), The Meme Machine (1999, now translated into 13 other languages), Consciousness: An Introduction (a textbook 2003), Conversations on Consciousness (2005) and Ten Zen Questions (2009).
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Artic...
She writes for several magazines and newspapers, blogs for the Guardian newspaper and Psychology Today, and is a frequent contributor and presenter on radio and television. She is author of over sixty academic articles, about fifty book contributions, and many book reviews. Her books include Dying to Live (on near-death experiences, 1993), In Search of the Light (autobiography, 1996),Test Your Psychic Powers (with Adam Hart-Davis, 1997), The Meme Machine (1999, now translated into 13 other languages), Consciousness: An Introduction (a textbook 2003), Conversations on Consciousness (2005) and Ten Zen Questions (2009).
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Artic...
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 27, 2019
Ok, wow. I know I love her writing style and how carefully she explores the (currently?) unanswerable questions from The Meme Machine. This memoir of her young adulthood, her time focused on uni, thesis, teaching, and research before she became (coincidentally?) almost in conjunction, a disbeliever and a mother, is mesmerizing. :get it?:
Specific examples of her work and her analyses of others' abound. One thing that was finally figured out is that people who tend to believe in paranormal mysteries tend to be exceptionally poor (very few humans are good...) at estimating probability. Intelligence, education, even maturity didn't seem to matter, either, as the medical students displayed the same results as the young schoolchildren. (This research prompted by one of those tales "I told her not to get on the plane, and the plane crashed but she was safe on the train.")
If you've ever had any interest in the big questions of philosophy (memory, consciousness, life-after-death, etc.) , or in psi, or even in altered states of mind or alternative therapies, and want to understand what value any of those have to you, or to science, or if you just like memoirs in general, I bet you'll like this. Dr. Blackmore is brave & brilliant and I'm even more impressed with her work now, even more eager to read more by her, and more willing to watch her videos because she's not written enough books.
She and Temple Grandin are my heroes.
Specific examples of her work and her analyses of others' abound. One thing that was finally figured out is that people who tend to believe in paranormal mysteries tend to be exceptionally poor (very few humans are good...) at estimating probability. Intelligence, education, even maturity didn't seem to matter, either, as the medical students displayed the same results as the young schoolchildren. (This research prompted by one of those tales "I told her not to get on the plane, and the plane crashed but she was safe on the train.")
If you've ever had any interest in the big questions of philosophy (memory, consciousness, life-after-death, etc.) , or in psi, or even in altered states of mind or alternative therapies, and want to understand what value any of those have to you, or to science, or if you just like memoirs in general, I bet you'll like this. Dr. Blackmore is brave & brilliant and I'm even more impressed with her work now, even more eager to read more by her, and more willing to watch her videos because she's not written enough books.
She and Temple Grandin are my heroes.
April 13, 2009
Susan K. Blackmore holds the distinction of being the first person in the U.K. ever to achieve a Ph.D. in parapsychology. But after decades of searching, she found no evidence for the paranormal whatsoever. But what a journey she had along the way! Read about her incredible life's journey in this landmark book!
April 7, 2025
THE RESEARCHER RECOUNTS THE BEGINNING OF HER JOURNEY TO SKEPTICISM
Susan Jane Blackmore (born 1951) is an English freelance writer and broadcaster on psychology and the paranormal. Interestingly, although she earned her Ph.D. in psychology and physiology with a thesis on, "Extrasensory Perception as a Cognitive Process," and herself once had an out-of-body experience, she has since become a skeptic, and is associated with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).
She wrote in the first chapter of this 1988 book, “I wish I could remember just how I felt about parapsychology all those years ago when I first began. I wish I could remember what it felt like to believe passionately in the possibility of the paranormal and to be fired with enthusiasm for tracking it down…. At the age of 18 … [I was] reading Rosalind Heywood’s ‘The Sixth Sense’… Through her book I first heard of the Society for Psychical Research and the experiments conducted since the 1880s on mediumship, traveling clairvoyance, and survival of bodily death… Parapsychology has everything a hook needs. It is mysterious and alluring. It has just enough ‘scientific’ evidence to provide bait, while at the same time… the inspiration for a crusading spirit to shout ‘I’ll show them’ [i.e., orthodox scientists].” (Pg. 7-8)
She recounts, “During [my] first term at Oxford, the activities of our Psychical Research Society expanded in all directions… [On one occasion] I suddenly saw below me, myself sitting cross-legged on the floor. And so began nearly three hours of the most exciting, challenging, and vivid adventures I have ever had… I somehow knew that that body down there was ‘mine,’ and yet it seemed quite unimportant… But one thing was certain: The experience was important to me---and the psychology and physiology I was learning in my ‘proper’ studies had nothing to say about it. In contrast, the occultists and spiritualists I kept meeting did have something to say about it. They told me I had … had an out-of-body experience… They told me that I was psychic and that I had a great future ahead of me as a healer or a clairvoyant…. I was drawn to their teachings… I found them intellectually unsatisfactory, but at least they had SOMETHING to say about what had happened to me.” (Pg. 13-15)
But she adds, “I was already making an interesting and fatal mistake. I was interpreting the ‘realness’ and vividness of my own experiences as meaning that they were ‘paranormal’ or ‘occult.’ It is an easily made and common mistake, and it took me many years to see it for what it was. But at that time… My paranormal theory was… a way of resolving the dissonance between my experience and my knowledge of psychology, a way of bridging the gap between the questions that fascinated me and the ones I could actually answer.” (Pg. 19)
While writing her thesis, she was conducting scientific experiments at the college. But “My problem was simple. I couldn’t find any ESP… Perhaps the whole subject was impossible! Was I wrong even for trying? Was the whole scientific enterprise inappropriate for understanding these things? Perhaps I should just forget all about scientific research. But I rejected that route… Science is not the rigid set of rules and tedious procedures some people make it out to be… What characterizes pseudoscience is its refusal to listen to the evidence… I wanted there to be ESP, and I wanted my theory to be right. But nature was telling me I was wrong.” (Pg. 55-57)
She continues, “my own failed experiments seemed to be set in the context of all that excitement and all that hope… There were very few who would argue that they had convincing ‘proof’ of ESP, and even fewer who would claim to have a repeatable experiment… Back in the 1930’s [J.B.] Rhine’s original card-guessing technique had seemed convincing… until others failed to replicate them… This is another of those problems rather peculiar to parapsychology… In most other fields there is rarely a conflict for long… [eventually] everyone comes to a consensus about which of you was right… In parapsychology… unrepeatability makes that consensus impossible. You have to agree to differ.” (Pg. 96-97)
At a meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society, she realizes, “The reason was not that people hadn’t heard of ESP.. or that they were too narrow-minded or biased. It was because ESP is a totally useless hypothesis. To say that the rats were using ESP would … add absolutely nothing. ESP is an empty hypothesis. ‘What a subject!’ I thought.” (Pg. 121)
At another meeting of the Society for Psychical Research [SPR], and was asked to write a book on out-of-body experiences... She muses, “After all, it was my own out-of-body experience that had really set me off in the first place. It was failing to understand that experience that had always spurred me on. Now I was going to write a book about it. I would make it the very best book I possibly could.” (Pg. 134)
She recalls, “When I had finally given up finding any psi for myself, I looked into other people’s experiences… the harder I looked, the less psi I found. So was there no such thing? I had certainly become increasingly skeptical… but I still didn’t totally disbelieve. I was almost prepared to believe that psi simply didn’t appear in the laboratory experiments, but what about the ‘real world’?... The last hiding place of psi had to be in these experiences outside the lab. I was going to have to tackle them. It was appropriate that I had to write a book on OBEs.” (Pg. 156)
She recounts, “I had always wanted to be a ‘famous parapsychologist.’ I may not be very famous, but I was certainly a parapsychologist: up here, chairing the session at the 1980 Parapsychological Association Convention. And what was I doing? I was doubting everything, and criticizing people who had done far more work than I had. Could I really justify it? I laughed at my own presumption.” (Pg. 187)
She summarizes, “I had investigated a poltergeist case, ventured into hypnotic regression, tested dowsers, and talked to countless psychics. And in all of this I had found no hint of any evidence for psi. Indeed, the deeper I looked into anything, the less paranormal it appeared to be. I think the most depressing part about it was that I realized all too clearly the problem I faced. People would say, ‘Oh, but you’ve only investigated one poltergeist case. That one wasn’t a GENUINE poltergeist at all.’ And I had no answer to that. I couldn’t investigate every claim of the paranormal… I couldn’t prove that psi didn’t exist.” (Pg. 217)
She goes on, “I also realized something else, and that was even more depressing. Deep down in my heart I knew what I believed… I honestly believed there was no psi!... I must even admit that I now felt relieved when something turned out to have a perfectly normal explanation. I longed to be able to explain everything away. What a horrible thing to have to admit---I really wasn’t open-minded any more!... I began to be truly depressed about parapsychology. I just didn’t know what to do with my new-found skepticism. I could see why so many people before me had just given up in disgust and left the field.” (Pg. 218)
She wonders, “There ARE phenomena! … It must be possible to make progress studying these… Yes, of course it was, but not by parapsychologists!... Myers’s experiments in 1903 were asking just the same questions as those of the past twenty years… Only the psychological theories seemed to be getting somewhere---and largely without the hypothesis of psi. Then there was progress being made on lucid dreams and near-death experiences, but outside of parapsychology… Perhaps all the real progress was made by people who pursued the phenomena for their own sake and without regard to psi…” (Pg. 240)
Blackmore’s account of her journey from believer to skeptic will be of great interest to other skeptics, but perhaps also to some more open-minded ‘believers.’
Susan Jane Blackmore (born 1951) is an English freelance writer and broadcaster on psychology and the paranormal. Interestingly, although she earned her Ph.D. in psychology and physiology with a thesis on, "Extrasensory Perception as a Cognitive Process," and herself once had an out-of-body experience, she has since become a skeptic, and is associated with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).
She wrote in the first chapter of this 1988 book, “I wish I could remember just how I felt about parapsychology all those years ago when I first began. I wish I could remember what it felt like to believe passionately in the possibility of the paranormal and to be fired with enthusiasm for tracking it down…. At the age of 18 … [I was] reading Rosalind Heywood’s ‘The Sixth Sense’… Through her book I first heard of the Society for Psychical Research and the experiments conducted since the 1880s on mediumship, traveling clairvoyance, and survival of bodily death… Parapsychology has everything a hook needs. It is mysterious and alluring. It has just enough ‘scientific’ evidence to provide bait, while at the same time… the inspiration for a crusading spirit to shout ‘I’ll show them’ [i.e., orthodox scientists].” (Pg. 7-8)
She recounts, “During [my] first term at Oxford, the activities of our Psychical Research Society expanded in all directions… [On one occasion] I suddenly saw below me, myself sitting cross-legged on the floor. And so began nearly three hours of the most exciting, challenging, and vivid adventures I have ever had… I somehow knew that that body down there was ‘mine,’ and yet it seemed quite unimportant… But one thing was certain: The experience was important to me---and the psychology and physiology I was learning in my ‘proper’ studies had nothing to say about it. In contrast, the occultists and spiritualists I kept meeting did have something to say about it. They told me I had … had an out-of-body experience… They told me that I was psychic and that I had a great future ahead of me as a healer or a clairvoyant…. I was drawn to their teachings… I found them intellectually unsatisfactory, but at least they had SOMETHING to say about what had happened to me.” (Pg. 13-15)
But she adds, “I was already making an interesting and fatal mistake. I was interpreting the ‘realness’ and vividness of my own experiences as meaning that they were ‘paranormal’ or ‘occult.’ It is an easily made and common mistake, and it took me many years to see it for what it was. But at that time… My paranormal theory was… a way of resolving the dissonance between my experience and my knowledge of psychology, a way of bridging the gap between the questions that fascinated me and the ones I could actually answer.” (Pg. 19)
While writing her thesis, she was conducting scientific experiments at the college. But “My problem was simple. I couldn’t find any ESP… Perhaps the whole subject was impossible! Was I wrong even for trying? Was the whole scientific enterprise inappropriate for understanding these things? Perhaps I should just forget all about scientific research. But I rejected that route… Science is not the rigid set of rules and tedious procedures some people make it out to be… What characterizes pseudoscience is its refusal to listen to the evidence… I wanted there to be ESP, and I wanted my theory to be right. But nature was telling me I was wrong.” (Pg. 55-57)
She continues, “my own failed experiments seemed to be set in the context of all that excitement and all that hope… There were very few who would argue that they had convincing ‘proof’ of ESP, and even fewer who would claim to have a repeatable experiment… Back in the 1930’s [J.B.] Rhine’s original card-guessing technique had seemed convincing… until others failed to replicate them… This is another of those problems rather peculiar to parapsychology… In most other fields there is rarely a conflict for long… [eventually] everyone comes to a consensus about which of you was right… In parapsychology… unrepeatability makes that consensus impossible. You have to agree to differ.” (Pg. 96-97)
At a meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society, she realizes, “The reason was not that people hadn’t heard of ESP.. or that they were too narrow-minded or biased. It was because ESP is a totally useless hypothesis. To say that the rats were using ESP would … add absolutely nothing. ESP is an empty hypothesis. ‘What a subject!’ I thought.” (Pg. 121)
At another meeting of the Society for Psychical Research [SPR], and was asked to write a book on out-of-body experiences... She muses, “After all, it was my own out-of-body experience that had really set me off in the first place. It was failing to understand that experience that had always spurred me on. Now I was going to write a book about it. I would make it the very best book I possibly could.” (Pg. 134)
She recalls, “When I had finally given up finding any psi for myself, I looked into other people’s experiences… the harder I looked, the less psi I found. So was there no such thing? I had certainly become increasingly skeptical… but I still didn’t totally disbelieve. I was almost prepared to believe that psi simply didn’t appear in the laboratory experiments, but what about the ‘real world’?... The last hiding place of psi had to be in these experiences outside the lab. I was going to have to tackle them. It was appropriate that I had to write a book on OBEs.” (Pg. 156)
She recounts, “I had always wanted to be a ‘famous parapsychologist.’ I may not be very famous, but I was certainly a parapsychologist: up here, chairing the session at the 1980 Parapsychological Association Convention. And what was I doing? I was doubting everything, and criticizing people who had done far more work than I had. Could I really justify it? I laughed at my own presumption.” (Pg. 187)
She summarizes, “I had investigated a poltergeist case, ventured into hypnotic regression, tested dowsers, and talked to countless psychics. And in all of this I had found no hint of any evidence for psi. Indeed, the deeper I looked into anything, the less paranormal it appeared to be. I think the most depressing part about it was that I realized all too clearly the problem I faced. People would say, ‘Oh, but you’ve only investigated one poltergeist case. That one wasn’t a GENUINE poltergeist at all.’ And I had no answer to that. I couldn’t investigate every claim of the paranormal… I couldn’t prove that psi didn’t exist.” (Pg. 217)
She goes on, “I also realized something else, and that was even more depressing. Deep down in my heart I knew what I believed… I honestly believed there was no psi!... I must even admit that I now felt relieved when something turned out to have a perfectly normal explanation. I longed to be able to explain everything away. What a horrible thing to have to admit---I really wasn’t open-minded any more!... I began to be truly depressed about parapsychology. I just didn’t know what to do with my new-found skepticism. I could see why so many people before me had just given up in disgust and left the field.” (Pg. 218)
She wonders, “There ARE phenomena! … It must be possible to make progress studying these… Yes, of course it was, but not by parapsychologists!... Myers’s experiments in 1903 were asking just the same questions as those of the past twenty years… Only the psychological theories seemed to be getting somewhere---and largely without the hypothesis of psi. Then there was progress being made on lucid dreams and near-death experiences, but outside of parapsychology… Perhaps all the real progress was made by people who pursued the phenomena for their own sake and without regard to psi…” (Pg. 240)
Blackmore’s account of her journey from believer to skeptic will be of great interest to other skeptics, but perhaps also to some more open-minded ‘believers.’
October 5, 2009
I only gave this 3 stars because the last few chapters were worth a strong 4, but the other 20+ chapters were only worth 2. It's a story of the author's journey from a believer in woo, to what appears to be the beginnings of genuine skepticism.
Her other books are much better, more skeptical, and definitely worth reading.
Her other books are much better, more skeptical, and definitely worth reading.
June 2, 2024
Susan Blackmore's The Adventures of a Parapsychologist takes readers on an interesting tour of the field of paranormal research. Blackmore was a student who dedicated her life to studying parapsychology because she had strong beliefs in telepathy, astral planes, and life after death. Her narrative is one of intense experimentation, involving anything from teaching students in altered states of consciousness to testing Tarot cards on young children in play groups. She went to haunted houses and experienced past-life regression because, in spite of her best efforts, none of her experiments produced the psi events she was looking for. Accused of being a "psi-inhibitory experimenter," Blackmore had to face the disheartening fact that faults marred even the more "successful" experiments she looked at. Blackmore shares an entertaining story that demonstrates her scientific rigor and personal curiosity as she narrates her experiences during her time at Cambridge. Her readiness to challenge her own assumptions and critically assess other people's writing gives the book admirable depth. However, her intense focus on disproving flawed studies may have obscured the broader implications of her findings, preventing some readers from delving deeper into the philosophical and psychological aspects of paranormal belief. In spite of this, the book is a thought-provoking book that emphasizes the value of applying critical thinking skills and pursuing the truth, no matter how elusive the answers may seem.
October 12, 2020
This book will delight all of those hard boiled skeptics who are happy to explain away anything and everything at all that high school physics from 1965 would not be able to explain. To their delight, Susan Blackmore set out as a believer to find evidence of ESP, and found nothing whatsoever, not even a hint of telepathy. Oh well. This, in my reading experience, is against the trend of folks who set off to disprove things of the unexplained realms, and found as they researched these things, be it UFOs or near death experience, to change their view from skeptics to believers. Blackmore on the other hand has given cannon fodder to all those who desire to shoot down virtually everything they personally don't hold to be true. I applaud her honesty and true skepticism, and would give her three to four stars for that, but found her style of writing lacking, at times hard to follow, and giving too much of some detail, and not enough of other.
Personally, I find her findings of no evidence not so terribly surprising, considering ... everything. Say, someone from another planet heard about some of the feats humans are said to be capable of in the Olympic games, and set out to test the theory of humans abilities by drawing on random samples of human from the phone book, they would find that the theory is untrue. No-one can jump that high, swim that fast, or do somersaults on a beam. Not true, if you have me for instance as the sample human. Same goes for stuff like telepathy. Of course it is true, but you have to observe it under the right conditions.
Personally, I find her findings of no evidence not so terribly surprising, considering ... everything. Say, someone from another planet heard about some of the feats humans are said to be capable of in the Olympic games, and set out to test the theory of humans abilities by drawing on random samples of human from the phone book, they would find that the theory is untrue. No-one can jump that high, swim that fast, or do somersaults on a beam. Not true, if you have me for instance as the sample human. Same goes for stuff like telepathy. Of course it is true, but you have to observe it under the right conditions.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews