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Seeing Myself: The New Science of Out-of-body Experiences
Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand their own mind and to find a spiritual path that is compatible with science
As an impressionable young student, Susan Blackmore had an intense, dramatic and life-changing experience, seeming to leave her body and travel the world. With no rational explanation for her out-of-body experience (OBE) she turned to astral projection and the paranormal, but soon despaired of finding answers. Decades later, a Swiss neurosurgeon accidentally discovered the spot in the brain that can induce OBEs and everything changed; this crucial spot is part of the brain's self-system and when disturbed so is our experience of self. Blackmore leaped back into OBE research and at last began to unravel what had happened to her. Seeing Myself describes her long quest for answers through spirituality, religion, drugs, meditation, philosophy and neuroscience.
Anyone can have an OBE, indeed 15 per cent of us have. Even more have experienced sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming and the creepy sense of an invisible presence. At last, with the advent of brain stimulation, fMRI scanning and virtual reality, all these phenomena are beginning to make sense. Long relegated to the very fringes of research, the new science of out-of-body experiences is now contributing to our understanding of consciousness and our very selves.
As an impressionable young student, Susan Blackmore had an intense, dramatic and life-changing experience, seeming to leave her body and travel the world. With no rational explanation for her out-of-body experience (OBE) she turned to astral projection and the paranormal, but soon despaired of finding answers. Decades later, a Swiss neurosurgeon accidentally discovered the spot in the brain that can induce OBEs and everything changed; this crucial spot is part of the brain's self-system and when disturbed so is our experience of self. Blackmore leaped back into OBE research and at last began to unravel what had happened to her. Seeing Myself describes her long quest for answers through spirituality, religion, drugs, meditation, philosophy and neuroscience.
Anyone can have an OBE, indeed 15 per cent of us have. Even more have experienced sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming and the creepy sense of an invisible presence. At last, with the advent of brain stimulation, fMRI scanning and virtual reality, all these phenomena are beginning to make sense. Long relegated to the very fringes of research, the new science of out-of-body experiences is now contributing to our understanding of consciousness and our very selves.
368 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2017
46 people are currently reading
346 people want to read
About the author
Susan Blackmore
32 books309 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 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 23, 2019
Remember Pam Reynolds from Life After Death, Powerful Evidence You Will Never Die? She had a near death experience when her brain was flatlined, as proven by EEG. It turns out that on closer inspection of her testimony, everything she remembered from out of her body occurred after anaesthesia but before she was clinically dead. This isn't the water-tight proof of life after death that believers were hoping for.
There was another good story in one of the NDE books about a woman who, during her NDE, noticed a shoe sitting on a ledge outside the hospital as her soul floated away through the walls. It turns out a couple of lads tested that too. They put a shoe in the same location and then walked around the hospital, confirming that the shoe could be seen through many hospital windows.
These rebuttals are convincing, but what's most convincing is that the stories that I read in books supporting NDEs are well known to Dr. Blackmore. It seems that the same few famous cases are frequently used as examples. NDE supporters often emphasise that there are literally thousands, if not millions, of NDE testimonies, but if the favourites are so easily undermined, how persuasive can the rest be?
Dr. Blackmore is not here to undermine NDEs, though. Like Laurin Bellg, she wants us to take these experiences seriously. They are clearly very meaningful and important to people, whether or not they turn out to be objectively real. Dr. Blackmore's gentle, kind-hearted failure to find verifiable examples of the paranormal is far more convincing than any smug, superior debunker.
The experiments to find out if auras are real were probably the most painful. People who perceive auras say that they extend beyond the human body, sometimes by as much as a foot. Therefore, if they are real, a person who can see auras ought to be able to tell if another person is hidden behind a curtain because they'll be able to see the aura peeping past the edge. Sadly, aura-viewers were unable to tell which curtain had a person hidden behind it, and this is all the sadder because they were surprised and embarrassed when they couldn't. They clearly sincerely believed that they could.
The investigations into out-of-body experiences were more interesting. Dr. Blackmore doesn't draw a strong distinction between OBEs induced by drugs, NDEs induced by death, or plain old lucid-dreaming and spirit-travelling. At first this struck me as odd - I'd assumed that obviously dreams are just dreams, and drugs probably just give you hallucinations, but she investigates it all. Spirit-walking and lucid dreams are much easier to test because people do them at will, and so one can plan tests beforehand. Alas, dreamers are unlikely to be able to prove they were beyond their body by simple methods such going to a pre-arranged location and returning with information (like knowing what object the experimenter left there for them to find).
I don't really know what to do with this information. Since it does seem to me to be the more plausible and expected conclusion - and yet, people who investigate thinks like remote-viewing are just as confident in their studies that it does bring back reliable answers.
Her chapters on OBEs and NDEs are more interesting because she goes into some depth on how your mind locates 'you'. Our body is constantly providing our mind with information, gathered through all the senses, and our mind puts that together into a model of where we are now. It turns out that the mind can be tricked - give it false information and it will mislocate itself. This has been done by nifty tricks like getting participants to wear VR goggles that slightly misrepresent what's in front of them, then giving mismatched feedback between what the participants are feeling and what they are seeing, this easily tricks them into thinking themselves in a different location. It's not too hard to extrapolate from that - drugs and massive trauma could easily send mismatched information to the brain causing it to miscalculate its location.
People who take drugs to induce OBEs often have strikingly similar experiences that begin with entering a tunnel that leads to the spirit realm. What could cause this? Some people say it's the memory of being born - but that's been disproven by showing that people who had vaginal births and people who were born by caesarian section have the same rates of 'tunnel' experience. Others have said that it's just the light fading to a pin-point due to oxygen deprivation, but that doesn't fit with the reports of the tunnel itself glowing, swirling, or being formed of geometric patterns. Well, when drugs cause disinhibition and hyperactivity in the brain, the excited cells in the visual cortex fire randomly, the denser cells in the centre of the vision signal light where there is none, and the movement-sensitive cells in the periphery signal movement.
Why are NDE experiences so often loving and peaceful? The brain's natural response to fear and trauma is to release morphine-like chemicals 'endogenous opiates'. These are well known to reduce pain and induce hallucinations. I'm not so sure this is completely persuasive to me. It seems to me like there would be a huge evolutionary advantage to feeling your fear and pain - these are useful emotions that motivate people to take immediate action to move themselves to safety! Surely dropping into a delightful fantasy world in dangerous situations would simply ensure that you stayed there and died? On the other hand, most NDEs take place during terrible accidents or heart attacks when a person can do nothing anyway - in that case, what use is the opiate at all? These are situations that would, in the ancestral environment, have always resulted in death. What's the evolutionary advantage of a nice fantasy just before you pop off?
What about the rare hellish NDE? One intriguing suggestion is that people are often given opioids if they are terminally ill to control their pain, if they slip into a coma the doctor may inject naloxone to counteract the opioids. Some reports of hellish NDEs come from such patients, so a lack of opioids could be the cause. (But then, if it's the opioids causing the hallucination, why the NDE at all?)
What about the amazing reality of the NDE; people so often report the afterlife as 'realler than reality'? Well, when you see reality through your eyes, you see it with all the faults of your visual system: light scattered inside the eye, scratches on your lenses, dust in the air or in the eye (for myself, I have annoying floaters caused by clumping in the vitreous). But fMRI scans of people after drinking ayahuasca shows levels of activity in the primary visual cortex as high as during normal vision with eyes open. The brain 'seeing' without any of the pesky confusions caused by actual vision.
The life review is another famous part of the NDE experience. Well, the same endorphins that Blackmore suggests may cause the NDE are found predominantly in the brain stem and reticular activating system which controls sleep and dreaming, and through-out the limbic system including the amygdala and hippocampus which lay down memories. The flood of endorphins suppress the inhibitory cells, which leads to uncontrolled hyperactivity. Voila, a flood of memories.
Although, NDE reporters are keen to focus on the stories that support their beliefs, many testimonies are less convincing: in Blackmore's own experience she floated up through the third floor of her house - which only had two floors. Other NDErs (14% in one study) encounter living people in the afterlife, who obviously couldn't have been there. Others encounter fictional people, or describe streets and buildings completely wrong. Clearly a lot of NDE experience is hallucinatory and this doesn't get nearly as much press as the stuff that turns out to be spookily prescient.
Blackmore admits to finding this depressing, not so much that our consciousness might end with our death, but that so many people investigating the question are obviously partisan and mis-using the evidence. If we stop obsessing about whether these experiences are 'real', then we can focus on enjoying the experience: 'everything in my life and yours, from making a cup of tea to falling in love, has to have some kind of basis in the body and brain. That does not belittle the experience one jot.'
I agree with Blackmore, and I think Conan said it best: 'Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.'
There was another good story in one of the NDE books about a woman who, during her NDE, noticed a shoe sitting on a ledge outside the hospital as her soul floated away through the walls. It turns out a couple of lads tested that too. They put a shoe in the same location and then walked around the hospital, confirming that the shoe could be seen through many hospital windows.
These rebuttals are convincing, but what's most convincing is that the stories that I read in books supporting NDEs are well known to Dr. Blackmore. It seems that the same few famous cases are frequently used as examples. NDE supporters often emphasise that there are literally thousands, if not millions, of NDE testimonies, but if the favourites are so easily undermined, how persuasive can the rest be?
Dr. Blackmore is not here to undermine NDEs, though. Like Laurin Bellg, she wants us to take these experiences seriously. They are clearly very meaningful and important to people, whether or not they turn out to be objectively real. Dr. Blackmore's gentle, kind-hearted failure to find verifiable examples of the paranormal is far more convincing than any smug, superior debunker.
The experiments to find out if auras are real were probably the most painful. People who perceive auras say that they extend beyond the human body, sometimes by as much as a foot. Therefore, if they are real, a person who can see auras ought to be able to tell if another person is hidden behind a curtain because they'll be able to see the aura peeping past the edge. Sadly, aura-viewers were unable to tell which curtain had a person hidden behind it, and this is all the sadder because they were surprised and embarrassed when they couldn't. They clearly sincerely believed that they could.
The investigations into out-of-body experiences were more interesting. Dr. Blackmore doesn't draw a strong distinction between OBEs induced by drugs, NDEs induced by death, or plain old lucid-dreaming and spirit-travelling. At first this struck me as odd - I'd assumed that obviously dreams are just dreams, and drugs probably just give you hallucinations, but she investigates it all. Spirit-walking and lucid dreams are much easier to test because people do them at will, and so one can plan tests beforehand. Alas, dreamers are unlikely to be able to prove they were beyond their body by simple methods such going to a pre-arranged location and returning with information (like knowing what object the experimenter left there for them to find).
I don't really know what to do with this information. Since it does seem to me to be the more plausible and expected conclusion - and yet, people who investigate thinks like remote-viewing are just as confident in their studies that it does bring back reliable answers.
Her chapters on OBEs and NDEs are more interesting because she goes into some depth on how your mind locates 'you'. Our body is constantly providing our mind with information, gathered through all the senses, and our mind puts that together into a model of where we are now. It turns out that the mind can be tricked - give it false information and it will mislocate itself. This has been done by nifty tricks like getting participants to wear VR goggles that slightly misrepresent what's in front of them, then giving mismatched feedback between what the participants are feeling and what they are seeing, this easily tricks them into thinking themselves in a different location. It's not too hard to extrapolate from that - drugs and massive trauma could easily send mismatched information to the brain causing it to miscalculate its location.
People who take drugs to induce OBEs often have strikingly similar experiences that begin with entering a tunnel that leads to the spirit realm. What could cause this? Some people say it's the memory of being born - but that's been disproven by showing that people who had vaginal births and people who were born by caesarian section have the same rates of 'tunnel' experience. Others have said that it's just the light fading to a pin-point due to oxygen deprivation, but that doesn't fit with the reports of the tunnel itself glowing, swirling, or being formed of geometric patterns. Well, when drugs cause disinhibition and hyperactivity in the brain, the excited cells in the visual cortex fire randomly, the denser cells in the centre of the vision signal light where there is none, and the movement-sensitive cells in the periphery signal movement.
Why are NDE experiences so often loving and peaceful? The brain's natural response to fear and trauma is to release morphine-like chemicals 'endogenous opiates'. These are well known to reduce pain and induce hallucinations. I'm not so sure this is completely persuasive to me. It seems to me like there would be a huge evolutionary advantage to feeling your fear and pain - these are useful emotions that motivate people to take immediate action to move themselves to safety! Surely dropping into a delightful fantasy world in dangerous situations would simply ensure that you stayed there and died? On the other hand, most NDEs take place during terrible accidents or heart attacks when a person can do nothing anyway - in that case, what use is the opiate at all? These are situations that would, in the ancestral environment, have always resulted in death. What's the evolutionary advantage of a nice fantasy just before you pop off?
What about the rare hellish NDE? One intriguing suggestion is that people are often given opioids if they are terminally ill to control their pain, if they slip into a coma the doctor may inject naloxone to counteract the opioids. Some reports of hellish NDEs come from such patients, so a lack of opioids could be the cause. (But then, if it's the opioids causing the hallucination, why the NDE at all?)
What about the amazing reality of the NDE; people so often report the afterlife as 'realler than reality'? Well, when you see reality through your eyes, you see it with all the faults of your visual system: light scattered inside the eye, scratches on your lenses, dust in the air or in the eye (for myself, I have annoying floaters caused by clumping in the vitreous). But fMRI scans of people after drinking ayahuasca shows levels of activity in the primary visual cortex as high as during normal vision with eyes open. The brain 'seeing' without any of the pesky confusions caused by actual vision.
The life review is another famous part of the NDE experience. Well, the same endorphins that Blackmore suggests may cause the NDE are found predominantly in the brain stem and reticular activating system which controls sleep and dreaming, and through-out the limbic system including the amygdala and hippocampus which lay down memories. The flood of endorphins suppress the inhibitory cells, which leads to uncontrolled hyperactivity. Voila, a flood of memories.
Although, NDE reporters are keen to focus on the stories that support their beliefs, many testimonies are less convincing: in Blackmore's own experience she floated up through the third floor of her house - which only had two floors. Other NDErs (14% in one study) encounter living people in the afterlife, who obviously couldn't have been there. Others encounter fictional people, or describe streets and buildings completely wrong. Clearly a lot of NDE experience is hallucinatory and this doesn't get nearly as much press as the stuff that turns out to be spookily prescient.
Blackmore admits to finding this depressing, not so much that our consciousness might end with our death, but that so many people investigating the question are obviously partisan and mis-using the evidence. If we stop obsessing about whether these experiences are 'real', then we can focus on enjoying the experience: 'everything in my life and yours, from making a cup of tea to falling in love, has to have some kind of basis in the body and brain. That does not belittle the experience one jot.'
I agree with Blackmore, and I think Conan said it best: 'Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.'
January 21, 2022
This is a profound exploration of the topic of out of body experiences, and the author's clearly intentional effort to be comprehensive embodies the main value of this book. However, she's good enough and works hard to ruin it...
What is it that makes "scientists" so obsessed with being "conclusive"? What's wrong with just acknowledging that we know too little to be able to make any significant predictions? Would a little humility stigmatize theories they propound?
It's so evident in this book that the author's study isn't very far from "interpretation of data in the light of theory" (and perhaps "analysis with eyes of paradigm", knowing very well that the topic under study would obviously be out-of-paradigm), with her theory being all that science related to the brain/consciousness and "we're all going to die" stuff. As sound as these theories are, Sue's eagerness to provide a conclusion blurs the lines between her kind of effort/method and those of omniscient "consciousness is non-local" preachers.
Unlike "the new science" of out-of-body experiences, which goes in the name of orthodox and "proper" science, those occultists and (pseudo)scientists know to expect to be controversial, or simply state unwillingness to undertake to 'authoritatively' or 'logically' convince, or simply to acknowledge failure to adapt "orthodox" science's methods.
To Sue: Great efforts. Laudable. Remarkable intellectual undertaking. She is clearly intelligent and that potently shows in this book. Great insights (my favorite one to ponder being "the universe is made of one thing, whatever it is, matter, or energy or...").
Perhaps this review is unfair, but this is probably one of those books that you either love a lot or hate a lot. Although I enjoyed the journey, the whole thing ended up being a disappointment.
She makes the same mistakes she's finding in other researchers works, including making claims in areas in which she's not an expert, ironically as part of counter-arguments to similar claims made by others about the same scientific discipline. And if you're prone to take things too personally, you may hate her if your dogmatism won't let you take her caustic and sarcastic criticism as impersonal (well, even if she personally targets other individuals using that tone).
What is it that makes "scientists" so obsessed with being "conclusive"? What's wrong with just acknowledging that we know too little to be able to make any significant predictions? Would a little humility stigmatize theories they propound?
It's so evident in this book that the author's study isn't very far from "interpretation of data in the light of theory" (and perhaps "analysis with eyes of paradigm", knowing very well that the topic under study would obviously be out-of-paradigm), with her theory being all that science related to the brain/consciousness and "we're all going to die" stuff. As sound as these theories are, Sue's eagerness to provide a conclusion blurs the lines between her kind of effort/method and those of omniscient "consciousness is non-local" preachers.
Unlike "the new science" of out-of-body experiences, which goes in the name of orthodox and "proper" science, those occultists and (pseudo)scientists know to expect to be controversial, or simply state unwillingness to undertake to 'authoritatively' or 'logically' convince, or simply to acknowledge failure to adapt "orthodox" science's methods.
To Sue: Great efforts. Laudable. Remarkable intellectual undertaking. She is clearly intelligent and that potently shows in this book. Great insights (my favorite one to ponder being "the universe is made of one thing, whatever it is, matter, or energy or...").
Perhaps this review is unfair, but this is probably one of those books that you either love a lot or hate a lot. Although I enjoyed the journey, the whole thing ended up being a disappointment.
She makes the same mistakes she's finding in other researchers works, including making claims in areas in which she's not an expert, ironically as part of counter-arguments to similar claims made by others about the same scientific discipline. And if you're prone to take things too personally, you may hate her if your dogmatism won't let you take her caustic and sarcastic criticism as impersonal (well, even if she personally targets other individuals using that tone).
June 16, 2022
I've just finished this book, and it's been around for a while. I think Susan has made a great job of trying to analyse the unanalysable. I have seen some of her YouTube videos and I'm impressed at her range of knowledge on this subject. What I can't get my head around are the references to laboratory created experiences. I can understand the drug induced OBEs and NDEs but if we look at Carlos Castaneda we will see that the drug induced experience is erroneous and the task for those who want it is to experience these things without them. I really do not think that the laboratory tests are valid.
Why do I say this? Like most people, or at least the 15% of them, I have had experiences which cannot be explained. I noted that Susan has had multiple mystical experiences without, at least, trying to explain what they are. Having had them myself, albeit maybe less than a dozen times, I have to say that trying to explain what happens in probably like trying to explain colour to somebody blind from birth. The only book I have read which gets anywhere near an explanation is 'The Teachings of the Mystics' by Walter T. Stace. One Arthur Koestler gets a mention there and also in Susan's book.
Now, I have to admit that I have not read any of Susan's other books and this one seems to end with a denial of duality. But how can she be so sure? This subject has been written about for thousands of years. Plato's 'Phaedo' is well worth a read, as is Fritjof Capra's 'The Tao of Physics'.
So, to wrap up this brief review, I have to say that the book has left me with more questions than answers. For example, although Susan does mention 'time' it doesn't go anywhere. Personally, I believe that during the period between heart death and brain death something is released from space and time, hence the 'eternal moment' which is like the classic mystical experience. And the OBE? Well, there are several Sufi stories which could explain them.
Finally, thank you Susan, you have reawakened things which, as an 80+ year old, maybe it's time for me to re-contemplate and re-evaluate my experiences before I embark on life's final (or is it?) experience.
Why do I say this? Like most people, or at least the 15% of them, I have had experiences which cannot be explained. I noted that Susan has had multiple mystical experiences without, at least, trying to explain what they are. Having had them myself, albeit maybe less than a dozen times, I have to say that trying to explain what happens in probably like trying to explain colour to somebody blind from birth. The only book I have read which gets anywhere near an explanation is 'The Teachings of the Mystics' by Walter T. Stace. One Arthur Koestler gets a mention there and also in Susan's book.
Now, I have to admit that I have not read any of Susan's other books and this one seems to end with a denial of duality. But how can she be so sure? This subject has been written about for thousands of years. Plato's 'Phaedo' is well worth a read, as is Fritjof Capra's 'The Tao of Physics'.
So, to wrap up this brief review, I have to say that the book has left me with more questions than answers. For example, although Susan does mention 'time' it doesn't go anywhere. Personally, I believe that during the period between heart death and brain death something is released from space and time, hence the 'eternal moment' which is like the classic mystical experience. And the OBE? Well, there are several Sufi stories which could explain them.
Finally, thank you Susan, you have reawakened things which, as an 80+ year old, maybe it's time for me to re-contemplate and re-evaluate my experiences before I embark on life's final (or is it?) experience.
June 17, 2024
A FASCINATING BOOK LOOKING DEEPER INTO OBEs AND NDEs
English psychologist Susan Jane Blackmore (born 1951) wrote in the first chapter of this 2017 book, “I was just nineteen when everything I thought I knew was overthrown and my life changed direction… I was determined to understand what had happened to me… How could an enthusiastic first-year student of psychology understand any of this?... the phrase ‘near-death experience’ (NDE) had not yet been invented. So I jumped to my own conclusions. I was sure that my spirit had left my body and would survive after death… I became determined to devote my life to parapsychology and to prove all my closed-minded lecturers wrong. I failed… The conclusions I had jumped to so quickly were ill-thought-out and superficial. But never mind. .. Nearly half a century later I can look back and see the way my intellectual life has been shaped, pushed and pulled by the experience, and how my spiritual life might never have even begun had I not found myself disappearing into selflessness …
“I did become a parapsychologist, hunting for paranormal phenomena and failing, time and again, to find them… That repeated failure, over months and years of experimentation, drove me back again and again to my own experience, the memory of which I could never shake off… nor could I induce it to happen again… I studied mystical theories of spirit separation … and found they led only to confusion and wild, untestable conjectures… Could there be a more down-to-earth explanation than astral projection? I soon discovered there was a more neutral term, ‘out-of-body experience’ or OBE… Almost no one seemed to want to understand these experiences scientifically… Several of us tried, back in the 1970s, to frame psychological theories without other worlds or traveling minds but with only a handful of us taking the experience seriously… Then, finally, with the turn of a new century, everything changed. That is why I am writing this book. This is why, after so many years, I have come back to … trying to understand what happened to me during those few hours in 1970.” (Pg. 1-3)
She states, “One of the many unanswered questions that I’d love to investigate is why OBEs are typically reported by perfectly healthy people, with no history of mental illness… For the moment, let’s just note that, like bilocation, all these experiences are suggestive of a human double. So what is going on? Is there really some other part of ourselves that sometimes emerges during life and then survives after death?” (Pg. 29)
She recalls, “At the London Society for Psychical Research several senior members swore they had seen ectoplasm with their own eyes. I came to know them well, being elected to the Executive Council… Over the years, as I gradually became more skeptical, I was often excluded… I was dubbed a ‘psi-inhibitory experimenter,’ meaning that psychic phenomena disappeared when my skeptical ‘vibrations’ were around… Others took the opposite view and … I received invitations from many psychics and mediums hoping to prove me wrong.” (Pg. 37)
She explains, “In my own OBE I saw chimneys that weren’t there and places that didn’t exist. Had I really seen verifiable things, either then or later, I might still be pursuing parapsychology, but it was years of repeated failures that eventually made my give it up as leading nowhere… Instead I want to understand why my experience happened at all and why it took the form it did.” (Pg. 61-62)
She observes, “I can see why so many skeptics dismiss astral traveling as nonsense but in the process they may be dismissing something important. That something is the consistencies to be found in the experiences described… And finally, there is the overwhelming vividness and clarity of the experience. Surely we can try to make sense of these consistencies without becoming embroiled in gobbledegook.” (Pg. 67) Later, she adds, “We need to start again from the basics, asking what OBEs are like, how they vary and all the other questions that case collections can help us answer.” (Pg. 79) She continued, “My hope is that one day we can bring together the personal approach… with the academic approach… Even more optimistically, I hope that studying the OBE might help us understand the self as well as the other way around.” (Pg. 88)
She states, “People seem naturally to believe in a single point, or at least a specific area, inside the body where ‘I’ am located, and they are quite consistent about where this is… Does this mean there is literally something sitting there inside your brain or heart? Could there be a soul or spirit or center of consciousness that lives inside the body and is really located where it seems to be? That seems unlikely. We know that the brain is a massively parallel processing system with multiple processing going on all the time and all over the place. So it seems far more plausible that the powerful sense of being a located self is constructed somehow by all this activity.” (Pg. 119)
She notes, “I wouldn’t be writing this book if research on out-of-body experiences had just carried on… never making any theoretical breakthrough. I am writing it now because, finally, things have changed. In 2002, a paper on OBEs was published … in ‘Nature,’ arguably the most prestigious science journal in the world. It declared, ‘The part of the brain that can induce out-of-body experiences can be located.” (Pg. 121) She goes on, “When brain scans were used to show that spiritual experiences have a basis in brain activity, the media were quick to proclaim that the ‘God spot’ had been found. Arguments soon polarized into those who thought this showed there is no need for a God… and others who claimed… that God used this spot in the brain to make his presence felt, or that ‘we’ use our brains to contact the divine… To me this suggests the beginnings of a naturalistic explanation for the mystical sense of oneness or nonduality…” (Pg. 126-127)
She summarizes, “We can now pull this together with something else we know about OBEs, the importance of illusory movement experiences (IMEs) in initiating them… IMEs typically precede both OB feelings and OB autoscopy. So now it makes sense. When conditions in the brain are right for producing the form constants, any of them may appear but it is only tunnels that induce an IME and so set the stage for an OBE. At last I think we can answer the question.” (Pg. 221)
She clarifies, “If you’ve read somewhere that Sue Blackmore says all NDEs are caused by lack of oxygen (and she is wrong), please don’t believe it. I do NOT think that all NDEs are caused by lack of oxygen, even if some are! My argument is that all of the classic NDE features are caused by excessive random or disorganized neural activity in different parts of the brain This random activation has many potential causes… Cerebral hypoxia (reduced oxygen) and anoxia (no oxygen) are just two more potential causes.” (Pg. 245) She adds, “I come back to one underlying cause of all OBEs whether close to death or not---the disinhibition that results in random or disorganized brain activity. When this happens in visual cortex it produces tunnels and lights… in the hippocampus and temporal lobes a life review.” (Pg. 254) But she admits, “I would love to be able to tell a simple story something like this: tunnels, lights, OBEs and life reviews depend on brain function and are therefore common to all ages and cultures, while the heavens and other worlds depend on people’s upbringing, religion and expectations… but the evidence is woefully inadequate.” (Pg. 259)
She summarizes, “when someone has an NDE they may, and often do, fear no one will believe them or even that they are going mad. So they understandably emphasize any small details that were correct and these tales are told and retold … The result is a total distortion of the truth… the answer is clear: lots of people have NDEs and OBEs with wonderful visions of places, scenes and people, but there is no reliable evidence that they have actually seen anything … or that consciousness survives beyond death. I will admit that I find this terribly depressing… the main reason I find it depressing, is the levels of emotional commitment… the trouble with NDE research is how unwilling people are to change their minds in the face of the evidence… I know how hard this is because I’ve had to do it myself, and do it big time. After my dramatic experience… I was totally and completely convinced… Yet I was wrong and had to change my mind. Now I ask different questions… how modern science can help me understand what really happened.” (Pg. 291-292)
She acknowledges, “For myself I am not a materialist (though many people seem to assume I must be). I reject dualism because it does not work so I could better be described as a neutral monist… I believe the universe consists of only one kind of stuff and I do not know what that stuff it---is it ultimately material, is it purely mental, is it mind and matter in some way combined, or is it something else altogether from which mind and matter emerge? I do not know---hence my endless struggles with the mind-body problem and the mystery of consciousness.” (Pg. 297)
She admits, “One further question still obsesses me after all these years: why is the OBE so utterly vivid and realistic? My own experience was probably the most intense of my whole life and I have never forgotten it. This intense realness was partly to do with … a wonderful visual quality that is hard to describe. In addition was a wider sense of realness: I seemed more alive, more awake, more really ‘me’ than ever before. There was a ‘rightness’ and immediacy about everything that made ordinary waking like seem dreamlike in comparison.” (Pg. 302) She adds, “People sometimes ask whether I am not upset to think my amazing experiences all come down to the firing of this set of neurons… or that neurotransmitter. Not at all. Everything in my life and yours… has to have some kind of basis in the body and brain. That does not belittle the experiences one jot. I am so grateful for those strange few hours all that long time ago; hours during which ‘I’ felt more real, more thoroughly alive, more really ‘me’ than in ordinary waking life.” (Pg. 306)
She quotes V.S. Ramachandran: “if you think you’re part of the ebb and flow of the cosmos, and there’s no separate little soul… that’s going to be extinguished---then it’s ennobling.” And she comments, “Although many people fear the consequences of accepting this idea, there is really no need. Giving up free will and living without its burden may be hard but is not impossible---I know, because that’s how I live. Oddly, I think this may have been a consequence of my OBE too. That amazing experience threw everything into question and left me pondering” Who am I? What’s the point of it all? Who is in control? What is consciousness? And among the many other consequences of this determined questioning was the conclusion that free will cannot be what it seems to be and I would have to give it up. It really is possible to live happily and morally without free will.” (Pg. 313-314)
As a fan of Blackmore’s ‘skeptical’ books, I was surprised to read how strongly she is still affected by her OBE from 1970---now nearly fifty years later. Some of her skeptical fans may be disappointed by this book, but it will be of great interest to those seeking greater understanding of OBEs, NDEs, and similar experiences.
English psychologist Susan Jane Blackmore (born 1951) wrote in the first chapter of this 2017 book, “I was just nineteen when everything I thought I knew was overthrown and my life changed direction… I was determined to understand what had happened to me… How could an enthusiastic first-year student of psychology understand any of this?... the phrase ‘near-death experience’ (NDE) had not yet been invented. So I jumped to my own conclusions. I was sure that my spirit had left my body and would survive after death… I became determined to devote my life to parapsychology and to prove all my closed-minded lecturers wrong. I failed… The conclusions I had jumped to so quickly were ill-thought-out and superficial. But never mind. .. Nearly half a century later I can look back and see the way my intellectual life has been shaped, pushed and pulled by the experience, and how my spiritual life might never have even begun had I not found myself disappearing into selflessness …
“I did become a parapsychologist, hunting for paranormal phenomena and failing, time and again, to find them… That repeated failure, over months and years of experimentation, drove me back again and again to my own experience, the memory of which I could never shake off… nor could I induce it to happen again… I studied mystical theories of spirit separation … and found they led only to confusion and wild, untestable conjectures… Could there be a more down-to-earth explanation than astral projection? I soon discovered there was a more neutral term, ‘out-of-body experience’ or OBE… Almost no one seemed to want to understand these experiences scientifically… Several of us tried, back in the 1970s, to frame psychological theories without other worlds or traveling minds but with only a handful of us taking the experience seriously… Then, finally, with the turn of a new century, everything changed. That is why I am writing this book. This is why, after so many years, I have come back to … trying to understand what happened to me during those few hours in 1970.” (Pg. 1-3)
She states, “One of the many unanswered questions that I’d love to investigate is why OBEs are typically reported by perfectly healthy people, with no history of mental illness… For the moment, let’s just note that, like bilocation, all these experiences are suggestive of a human double. So what is going on? Is there really some other part of ourselves that sometimes emerges during life and then survives after death?” (Pg. 29)
She recalls, “At the London Society for Psychical Research several senior members swore they had seen ectoplasm with their own eyes. I came to know them well, being elected to the Executive Council… Over the years, as I gradually became more skeptical, I was often excluded… I was dubbed a ‘psi-inhibitory experimenter,’ meaning that psychic phenomena disappeared when my skeptical ‘vibrations’ were around… Others took the opposite view and … I received invitations from many psychics and mediums hoping to prove me wrong.” (Pg. 37)
She explains, “In my own OBE I saw chimneys that weren’t there and places that didn’t exist. Had I really seen verifiable things, either then or later, I might still be pursuing parapsychology, but it was years of repeated failures that eventually made my give it up as leading nowhere… Instead I want to understand why my experience happened at all and why it took the form it did.” (Pg. 61-62)
She observes, “I can see why so many skeptics dismiss astral traveling as nonsense but in the process they may be dismissing something important. That something is the consistencies to be found in the experiences described… And finally, there is the overwhelming vividness and clarity of the experience. Surely we can try to make sense of these consistencies without becoming embroiled in gobbledegook.” (Pg. 67) Later, she adds, “We need to start again from the basics, asking what OBEs are like, how they vary and all the other questions that case collections can help us answer.” (Pg. 79) She continued, “My hope is that one day we can bring together the personal approach… with the academic approach… Even more optimistically, I hope that studying the OBE might help us understand the self as well as the other way around.” (Pg. 88)
She states, “People seem naturally to believe in a single point, or at least a specific area, inside the body where ‘I’ am located, and they are quite consistent about where this is… Does this mean there is literally something sitting there inside your brain or heart? Could there be a soul or spirit or center of consciousness that lives inside the body and is really located where it seems to be? That seems unlikely. We know that the brain is a massively parallel processing system with multiple processing going on all the time and all over the place. So it seems far more plausible that the powerful sense of being a located self is constructed somehow by all this activity.” (Pg. 119)
She notes, “I wouldn’t be writing this book if research on out-of-body experiences had just carried on… never making any theoretical breakthrough. I am writing it now because, finally, things have changed. In 2002, a paper on OBEs was published … in ‘Nature,’ arguably the most prestigious science journal in the world. It declared, ‘The part of the brain that can induce out-of-body experiences can be located.” (Pg. 121) She goes on, “When brain scans were used to show that spiritual experiences have a basis in brain activity, the media were quick to proclaim that the ‘God spot’ had been found. Arguments soon polarized into those who thought this showed there is no need for a God… and others who claimed… that God used this spot in the brain to make his presence felt, or that ‘we’ use our brains to contact the divine… To me this suggests the beginnings of a naturalistic explanation for the mystical sense of oneness or nonduality…” (Pg. 126-127)
She summarizes, “We can now pull this together with something else we know about OBEs, the importance of illusory movement experiences (IMEs) in initiating them… IMEs typically precede both OB feelings and OB autoscopy. So now it makes sense. When conditions in the brain are right for producing the form constants, any of them may appear but it is only tunnels that induce an IME and so set the stage for an OBE. At last I think we can answer the question.” (Pg. 221)
She clarifies, “If you’ve read somewhere that Sue Blackmore says all NDEs are caused by lack of oxygen (and she is wrong), please don’t believe it. I do NOT think that all NDEs are caused by lack of oxygen, even if some are! My argument is that all of the classic NDE features are caused by excessive random or disorganized neural activity in different parts of the brain This random activation has many potential causes… Cerebral hypoxia (reduced oxygen) and anoxia (no oxygen) are just two more potential causes.” (Pg. 245) She adds, “I come back to one underlying cause of all OBEs whether close to death or not---the disinhibition that results in random or disorganized brain activity. When this happens in visual cortex it produces tunnels and lights… in the hippocampus and temporal lobes a life review.” (Pg. 254) But she admits, “I would love to be able to tell a simple story something like this: tunnels, lights, OBEs and life reviews depend on brain function and are therefore common to all ages and cultures, while the heavens and other worlds depend on people’s upbringing, religion and expectations… but the evidence is woefully inadequate.” (Pg. 259)
She summarizes, “when someone has an NDE they may, and often do, fear no one will believe them or even that they are going mad. So they understandably emphasize any small details that were correct and these tales are told and retold … The result is a total distortion of the truth… the answer is clear: lots of people have NDEs and OBEs with wonderful visions of places, scenes and people, but there is no reliable evidence that they have actually seen anything … or that consciousness survives beyond death. I will admit that I find this terribly depressing… the main reason I find it depressing, is the levels of emotional commitment… the trouble with NDE research is how unwilling people are to change their minds in the face of the evidence… I know how hard this is because I’ve had to do it myself, and do it big time. After my dramatic experience… I was totally and completely convinced… Yet I was wrong and had to change my mind. Now I ask different questions… how modern science can help me understand what really happened.” (Pg. 291-292)
She acknowledges, “For myself I am not a materialist (though many people seem to assume I must be). I reject dualism because it does not work so I could better be described as a neutral monist… I believe the universe consists of only one kind of stuff and I do not know what that stuff it---is it ultimately material, is it purely mental, is it mind and matter in some way combined, or is it something else altogether from which mind and matter emerge? I do not know---hence my endless struggles with the mind-body problem and the mystery of consciousness.” (Pg. 297)
She admits, “One further question still obsesses me after all these years: why is the OBE so utterly vivid and realistic? My own experience was probably the most intense of my whole life and I have never forgotten it. This intense realness was partly to do with … a wonderful visual quality that is hard to describe. In addition was a wider sense of realness: I seemed more alive, more awake, more really ‘me’ than ever before. There was a ‘rightness’ and immediacy about everything that made ordinary waking like seem dreamlike in comparison.” (Pg. 302) She adds, “People sometimes ask whether I am not upset to think my amazing experiences all come down to the firing of this set of neurons… or that neurotransmitter. Not at all. Everything in my life and yours… has to have some kind of basis in the body and brain. That does not belittle the experiences one jot. I am so grateful for those strange few hours all that long time ago; hours during which ‘I’ felt more real, more thoroughly alive, more really ‘me’ than in ordinary waking life.” (Pg. 306)
She quotes V.S. Ramachandran: “if you think you’re part of the ebb and flow of the cosmos, and there’s no separate little soul… that’s going to be extinguished---then it’s ennobling.” And she comments, “Although many people fear the consequences of accepting this idea, there is really no need. Giving up free will and living without its burden may be hard but is not impossible---I know, because that’s how I live. Oddly, I think this may have been a consequence of my OBE too. That amazing experience threw everything into question and left me pondering” Who am I? What’s the point of it all? Who is in control? What is consciousness? And among the many other consequences of this determined questioning was the conclusion that free will cannot be what it seems to be and I would have to give it up. It really is possible to live happily and morally without free will.” (Pg. 313-314)
As a fan of Blackmore’s ‘skeptical’ books, I was surprised to read how strongly she is still affected by her OBE from 1970---now nearly fifty years later. Some of her skeptical fans may be disappointed by this book, but it will be of great interest to those seeking greater understanding of OBEs, NDEs, and similar experiences.
October 3, 2023
Susan is going back to her Out of Body Experience and gives it a scientific explanation, permitted by 50 years of research since its occurrence.
Far from the paranormal explanation they have long been associated with, OBE are now studied phenomena which give clues about the building of our consciousness, body plan, and sense of I.
By studying other long discarded events (like Near Death Experience, Body Illusions,...) , Susan breaks down the origin of these events in our brain, and give clues as what it means for the definition of consciousness. A good demystification work.
Far from the paranormal explanation they have long been associated with, OBE are now studied phenomena which give clues about the building of our consciousness, body plan, and sense of I.
By studying other long discarded events (like Near Death Experience, Body Illusions,...) , Susan breaks down the origin of these events in our brain, and give clues as what it means for the definition of consciousness. A good demystification work.
October 16, 2017
Hauskasti kirjoitettu ja perinpohjainen kirja kehostapoistumiskokemuksesta. Henkilökohtaiset kokemukset ja anekdootit tekevät tästä todella kiinnostavan. Toisaalta välillä uppoudutaan hiukan liian syvälle pseudotieteellisten teorioiden pohdiskeluun. Pohjimmiltaan tämä on kuitenkin hyvin tieteellinen näkemys ilmiöön ja siteeraa uusinta tutkimusta.
March 28, 2023
Monist explains science of OBEs, including her own, in a way that dismisses dualism. She is not a committed materialist, since she is not sure what is the single basis of all reality.
Richard Dawkins has referred to this book.
I am not satisfied, in the end, with her conclusions, but her story is really fascinating, including her former interest in the occult.
Richard Dawkins has referred to this book.
I am not satisfied, in the end, with her conclusions, but her story is really fascinating, including her former interest in the occult.
January 5, 2020
I was worried at first that this was going to be some paranormal occultist bullsh*t fake science, but it was actually really good and systematic in its onlook on body schema and consciousness.
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