Susan Blackmore, Ph.D.
A Skeptic’s View of Consciousness
Photo used by permission
You were born July 29, 1951, in London, which makes you a Leo. I know you’re not a believer in astrology, but do you identify with any Leo traits? I did once upon a time read about that sort of thing and I think there were some characteristics that I had. I have done some research on astrology which just confirms some of my greatest fears which is that people bend themselves toward what they think they are supposed to be according to astrology. We know from hundreds of experiments that astrology can’t predict which partners you’ll get along with or what your life will be like or anything else.Millions of Indians think otherwise and use astrology as an aid in choosing a marriage partner. Even worse, I think they can mold their children. “Oh, he’s going to be a little Leo so that means he’ll be….”It’s true that if you tell teachers, “This group of children is brilliant and this one is just average,” the ones the teacher thinks is brilliant will perform better. Absolutely, exactly that.
What’s your Myers-Briggs type? INTJ, but that sort of thing doesn’t really interest me. In the classic extraversion-introversion test, I’m just weird because people always just assume from my behavior that I’m extrovert, yet I come out on the questionnaires to be an introvert. Questions like, “In the evening would you rather go out to a party and have fun or sit at your desk working?” I’d rather sit at my desk working. Why would I rather go to a party and waste time? I want to get on with my life.
What about your birth order? I’m asking because a “rebel scientist” study found people who are not conformists tended to be later-borns. I read that research too. I’m a first-born.Like the majority of the visionary scientists. I have a sister two and a half years younger and a brother eleven years younger.
What about your childhood led you to Oxford? Girls probably weren’t in a large segment of the student population when you went. No, it was one to eight. It was fantastic. The downside was there were only three women’s colleges and they were all-women but loads and loads of men’s colleges. It was a year after I left that they changed that. I was the last person in Oxford to be rusticated, which means sent away from Oxford to the country for the rest of the term for being found with a man in my room. When my daughter went to Oxford, they were told they could only have two men in their room at a time. It’s changed that much.
Your question about how I got there is very hard to say. My father was a well-to-do businessman. My dad didn’t expect his wife to work so she was a housewife. I was sent to a vile awful boarding school, but I discovered there that I was bright, which was my way of coping with life when I thought all the other girls hated me. My way to survive was to work harder and become top in physics and chemistry, although at a girls’ boarding school in the 1960s this does not make you popular. Nevertheless, it was the only thing that I could put my energies into, so I did well on my A levels.
At one point, I thought I wanted to be a doctor and my mom badly wanted me to be a doctor, but I had a realization in the middle of the night in my dormitory bed tha
