Imaginative Minds: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

30 April-1 May 2004

The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

Susan Blackmore

Susan Blackmore is a psychologist, freelance writer, and lecturer. She has a degree in psychology and physiology from Oxford, and an MSc and PhD from Surrey University. She worked on the paranormal for many years, and was awarded prizes by both psychical research and sceptical societies, but eventually gave it up completely - having become sceptical of all paranormal claims and frustrated by the lack of progress in parapsychology. Her current research interests include theories of consciousness, the effects of meditation, evolutionary psychology, creativity, and memetics.

Sue Blackmore was for ten years a Senior Lecturer and then Reader in Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, but left in 2001 to write an undergraduate textbook on consciousness. She is author of more than sixty scientific articles and forty book contributions. She writes for several magazines and newspapers, and is a frequent contributor on radio and television, both in the UK and abroad. She has presented several television programmes including a Horizon on alien abductions and a Channel 4 documentary on the intelligence of apes. She has been training in Zen for twenty years.

Her books include Dying to Live: Near-death experience (1993), Test your Psychic Powers (with Adam Hart-Davis, 1995), and an autobiography In Search of the Lighy (1996). The Meme Machine (1999) has been translated into eleven other languages. Consciousness: An Introduction was published in June 2003.