I'm your host Michael Schurmer. You're watching or listening to the

science salon podcast. Thanks for tuning in. We really appreciate your support and

if you find the podcast valuable please support it through your donations and support

at skeptic.com. You can just click on the donation button there on the home page.

Or you can click on our Patreon account which we have

in the home page at patreon.com slash skeptic the science law on Podcast grew out of our original Caltech Distinguished

Science Lecture Series that we hosted for over 20 years at Caltech and

that morphed into our science salon live events and and now thanks to

technology we're able to bring you these weekly dialogues with leading

scientists and scholars and I'm honored today to host Dr. Susan Blackmore. I've known Sue since the

early 90s when we founded the Skeptic Society and Skeptic magazine in

1992. She was already a rock star in the skeptical movement

because she was famous for having originally been a believer in the

paranormal and the supernatural and ESP and telekinesis and all that. In fact, she's one of the few people and And then she became a skeptic of all of that simply because she tested it.

She tested Carl Popper's idea of the falsifiability of science by running experiments and

discovered that the tighter the controls are in studying the

paranormal the weaker the effects get to the point where they disappear.

So she wrote books about this and lots of articles and also wrote about her own near death and out-of-body experiences

her astral projection as it were and then wrote a book called Dying to Live and

her career developed and she wrote on consciousness,

alter states of consciousness and then consciousness itself and all the problems that ensues.

She's got a leading textbook on consciousness study. She's got a leading textbook on consciousness study.

...