 Well I started out doing Physiology and Psychology at Oxford. An extraordinary thing happened to me… …I had this outer body experience, mystical experience. I still don't know what to call it because it was so deep, profound and extraordinary… …that it set me off wanting to understand the mind… …and I was absolutely convinced that it proved paranormal phenomena. And that's why I spent probably the first 20 or 25 years of my research life… …looking into paranormal phenomena. Felly, hynny'n fawr i'ch gynnal i ddechrau'n... Ond mae hwnnw, mae hwnnw, mae hwnnw'n fawr i'r cyfryd. A'r ysgolwch yn dweud yn y fawr bod yn digwydd. Mae'r ysgolwch yn y fawr, mae'r ddechrau'n mynd. Ac mae'r ysgolwch yn dweud? Felly mae'r ysgolwch yn dweud, ond mae'r ysgolwch yn dweud? Ond mae'r fawr yn dweud? Yn dweud, dyma? Mae'r ysgolwch yn dweud. Mae'r ystyried o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Can you tell us a bit about experience that you had back when that kind of started you down that path? I can tell you a little about it, nothing I say will really do justice to it. I still remember it, it was 1970, so goodness knows that's 44 years ago. It was my first term at university, I was burning the candle at both ends, I was really tired. I joined the psychic research society, just as you do something interesting. We'd had a Ouija board session which has been a daft thing to do and puts you in a bit of a funny state anyway. I went back to a friends room afterwards, smoked a joint, this was 1970, and well we did that, that wasn't unusual. Listening to some music which I think was probably Pink Floyd but I'm not sure. So there I am listening to wonderful music sitting on the floor really tired, a little bit stoned, not very much, going down a tunnel, as going down a dark tunnel towards a bright light. The tunnel was made of trees but I'd never heard of tunnel experiences, the term near-death experience hadn't been invented. But there I was, in retrospect I can see, going through the classic thing, down the tunnel, out of the end, suddenly I'm on the ceiling looking down, there's my body down there, there's my two friends over there, I'm on the ceiling looking down and I could see the mouth down there going, I'm on the ceiling looking down. You know, this is the real me, that's just a shell. All those intuitions we have about being a spirit or a soul or something inside the body that can leave us, wow it's really true! And then one of my friends said, can you go and move? And I went shooting off and I travelled, I mean it's a long story to cut it very short. I seemed to travel the world, to fly over the sea and to become really, I was originally a sort of human shape but then I became other shapes and then I thought I got bit frightened and I thought I had to come back and I couldn't get back. I got back to the room but I was so disoriented, I tried to go inside the body and I went smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. I'd never heard of any of these things, they happen to people quite, not commonly exactly, but you know, all over the times and places they've happened. So I tried to get bigger so I got bigger and bigger and bigger and that led me to the classic experience, the mystical experience of oneness, where everything was me and not me, the concept of me made no sense. Time and space sort of, there were time and space but not in the ordinary sense we know at all. I mean things happened but not within a matrix like we normally think of it. And then I was left at the end with a very powerful sense of wherever you go there's always something further. And I came back saying that, took me a couple of days to get remotely back to normal and I had a very supportive friend who helped me. You can imagine, I was studying cutting up rats' brains to try and understand memory. That's the sort of thing we did in those days, long before the cognitive revolution and long before people were talking about meditation and mindfulness or anything like that. And there I was, what's going on? So looking back I can understand why I lept at paranormal explanations even though they're hopeless and they'll get you anywhere. Because how could I possibly understand it? Now the science is catching up but it's taken all those 44 years to make sense of what happened remotely. Obviously moving from that amazing out-of-body experience to studying paranormal psychology and ultimately becoming a skeptic didn't happen overnight. Can you give us a sense for how that path happened from moving to that experience to where you are I suppose now? Yeah, I struggled along. That was the first term of my three-year degree. And I loved studying the physiology and psychology. But I kind of struggled along all the time with this in my mind. I ran the Psychical Research Society at Oxford for the whole time I was there. We did experiments not just with weeded boards but telepathy and clairvoyance and so we went and visited haunted houses and we invited mediums to come and communicate with the dead with us. And I did a lot of that as an undergraduate. And then I was absolutely determined that I was going to become a parapsychologist. Because by then I discovered there was this thing called parapsychology that there were very few scientists out there in the world studying these things scientifically. And that's what I wanted to do. And my tutor said, you know, no way, that's rubbish, you mustn't do that. I got a sensible PhD place studying rat brains, which I turned down. And eventually I found a university that I had to pay my way, got a job, did a part-time PhD which was really unusual in those days. And funded my way and worked my way through a PhD and designed all these experiments. I'd got this grand theory of the Akashic records and the psychic field and the phenomena out there that really memory is not in our brain at all. It's all out there. And that that's, therefore, when I get something telepathically from you it's really the same thing as memory. Lovely theory. I discovered two things. One, I wasn't original in this. There are versions of that have been Bergson back in 1910, going way back, lots of them. And secondly, it doesn't work. I did experiment after experiment after experiment. The first two or three experiments got little hints of what looked like ESP. But as soon as I tightened up the methods, got the statistics right, did the experiments well, all the effects went away. And I did dozens of experiments that showed no sign of any telepathy or clairvoyance or precognition or anything. And so I thought, well, but I still know tarot cards work. By then I'd learnt to read the tarot cards. I had my crystal ball and I'd learnt to stare into the crystal ball and see things and all this stuff. So I believed in those and I had this extraordinary new experience. So of course all my tutors are wrong. They're closed-minded scientists. They don't realise there's more in the world than in your philosophy, all that stuff, you know? And I stayed like that for quite a long time. It was like the world, the truth, the evidence was eating away at my beliefs. And I had to drop that and drop that. And then there's another corner and another corner to turn and drop that. And then there came a point and I can remember it. It's one of those sort of flash-bulb memories. Although I could have invented it because we know the doubts about how memory works but there's some truth in it anyway. I was sat in a bath one day in my house in Guildford and I thought, what if none of it's true? And it was awful to then have to go through all I knew over the next sort of weeks really and think, is it possible that I was completely wrong? That experience happened. My memories of that are very clear. They could be a bit distorted and I've selected bits and so on but I cannot deny the experience and I met loads of other people who had extraordinary experiences too. Somehow those experiences have to be valid, meaningful, life-changing experiences without there being telepathy, clairvoyance, other worlds, all of that stuff which after experiment, after experiment, I'd found just isn't there. And in a way the rest of my life has been that unfolding. I've had jobs as a university lecturer and reader and now a visiting professor at Plymouth but most of the time I haven't had a job. I just want to do my research. I want to write my books. So I've sort of limped along kind of and made a life out of exploring these things. Can you give us a sense for what one of these experiments might look like? So someone who might not be familiar with the experimental method and so on, if you wanted to test, for example, tarot cards or whether one of these claims were true, what would it look like? I mean how would you do the experiment? I'll tell you about three very different approaches. Where I started was very lab-based, straightforward tests of telepathy and clairvoyance. So a simple example I would get, I used to teach a parapsychology course to a lot of students at Surrey University, so I'd have maybe a hundred of them in Elector Theatre. And we would have hidden targets in another room and they would sit there with a sheet and they'd have to, you know, a time signal, they'd have to think what the hidden target was and tick it off and then you do all the statistics and you compare it with how many correct you'd expect by chance. And it always came out just what you'd expect by chance. Those sort of experiments you can say, well that's not telepathy in the real world. In the real world it happens between twins, it happens when people are in special states of imagery or relaxation, so I moved on from those to get people into special states to put them into Gansfeld with great relaxation and white noise and things over their eyes to get them to imagine things, no better results. A completely different kind of experiment, you mentioned tarot. Now I'd become a competent, not brilliant, but a competent tarot reader and people said things like, how did you know that? You know all that stuff. So I devised a method for doing the tarot reading in two separate parts so that an assistant would sit down with the person, do all the laying out of the cards, get them in the right frame of mind and so on, get them to shuffle the cards, lay them out and so on and then send them away, give me the order of the cards. I would get myself into the right frame of mind, imagine that the person was there, which they weren't, and do the reading to myself and then write it all down, do that for ten people and see can those people pick their own reading out of the ten. No, they can't. I'm trying all the time not to make it so artificial to try to make it more realistic. And finally, you mentioned out of the body experiences, I have for a very, very long time in my house in Somerset. I used to have targets in my house. I met this strange young man who ran a astral projection group and a magazine and so on and he said, he came to visit me and we talked about all this stuff and he said, if you put a five digit number in your house I will come and visit and he said, I have out of the body experiences spontaneously at night I can't say when they're going to happen but if you have that there all the time when I have one I will come and visit and he said, cook me an apple crumble every so often and that'll bring me there's my favourite thing so I would do that too. So this is not an artificial lab experiment this is an ongoing experiment now I had to put it where nobody could come and I didn't think he would but I had to make sure he couldn't look through the window I had to change the number every so often and for the first few months every Sunday evening I changed the number I had a word chosen from one in 20 words I had a small object like a toothbrush or a penny or something and I stuck that on the wall so there were three possible things every time I met someone else who had spontaneous out of the body experiences I would explain that to them and say anytime you come in all those years when those targets were there I had three people who wrote to me and said I've been to your house and I've seen it and none of them got it right one got one word right but that disappears in the noise and they were sure they'd seen it you see when you have an out of the body experience that you're so vivid that you can't help but believe that you're actually seeing something physically there that you're not If we went back to 1970 the day after your out of body experience Nice time machine you're going to give me That's right and we tried and we approached you and said and tried to convince you that this out of body experience could be explained using natural means What would it have taken to convince you? Could it have happened? How interesting I think you should work on this time machine and we'll find out That's really interesting I'm trying 44 years I've changed a bit I think there would have been two things going on in my mind at once and I think there even were during the experience those things going on on the one hand would have been but I know you don't understand you don't understand how real it was how can you possibly this is so important to me and it means so much to me and simultaneously would have been going on but there has to be an explanation what's going on I've always been a a scientist in the broadest sense since I was a kid how does that work what's this doing how does this fight and that would have been going on as well I think if you'd approached me as some of the worst members of the sceptical community would be like that's rubbish then I would have been absolutely against it but if you'd come along and said could it be the something in the brain could it be I'd have been thinking could be I might have been frightened because the day after I was so confused I think you'd have to come a little week later when I sort of calmed down a bit but in a way when people have these very dramatic experiences and I've met lots of people who have you feel threatened if somebody tells you it's not what you thought and if you are a sort of rigid closed-minded kind of thinker and when you've had this extraordinary experience you step onto your own explanation then it's very very hard you feel frightened when people say ah yes but it's happening in the middler or the prefrontal court or whatever but if you're more open minded if you're good at thinking if you're asking questions if you're good at exploring possibilities then I think it's much easier and if the person confronting you is also like that let's explore this together how did it really feel and then what happened and take an interest then I think I would have responded quite well to you and been hey you might be my saviour let's go and find out but I didn't have a saviour I had to go and find out myself in an age where the science was wasn't any neuroscience we had a very little idea what was happening in the brain the paranormal stuff out there in the new age and the age of Aquarius and all that stuff at the end of the 60s was like a world apart and that's why it's taken me a lifetime I would say to bring together extraordinary experiences and neuroscience So a lot of people who are going to be watching these videos and taking this course would have had something similar some vivid experience that they can't really explain we've done these sort of questionnaires in this course and in others where students have heard a story from parents about ghosts or they've experienced something themselves how would you given what you know now about opinion change and changing your own opinion what would be the best way to approach somebody and change their mind or at least get them to consider the alternatives that it might not be what they think I'm glad you made that switch I don't go at anyone who's had an extraordinary experience I want to change their mind unless they are just so rigid I despair and I think I don't want to have anything to do with it but for most of the people I've met so many have had an experience they can't understand and they don't know what to do with it the first thing to do is to listen and probe some people will be very rigid particularly I think of near death experiences where it has so much of religious connotations and in our culture this tends most often not always but to be Christians who are convinced that they have seen Jesus or pearly gates the judgment day they've been to heaven or they've seen heaven or they've seen hell they've got all this baggage but what I first do is then what happened could you see anything else get them to loosen up because if what they've done is had this extraordinary experience typically in a near death experience if it's a long one they will typically start with a tunnel like I did and go into the light they'll have an out of the body experience and they'll watch what's physically happening or seem to then they'll go on to other worlds and it becomes dependent on your culture and your upbringing so if they are a religious person a Muslim or a Hindu or whatever it might be or a Christian they kind of know where they are they've set their own experience in that box so part of my job is to actually get them to remember other things what did these pearly gates like what else could you see around and very often then they'll come up with all sorts of other stuff which will help them the point is I'm grounding it in what really happened because I want to know because I'm always thinking what's going on in their brain where is this relating to what's happening in the temporal lobe what's happening in the visual cortex where we know the tunnels are generated what kind of tunnel was it what emotional state were they in when they started because very often these experiences have a most wonderful profound sense of it's all right which is probably endorphin based but saying that doesn't put it down it's got to have a physical basis somehow but that can be quite an important thing also for people to know it is possible as a human being on this earth without God's spirits and everything else to know that it's all right and you're all right so I'd like to help people just to talk about the experiences sometimes that will lead them to their own interest and their own inquiry and they'll go off and read stuff and they'll talk stuff and let them do that other times they'll just reject it and go yeah well I know I saw Jesus I might want to but it's not going to work there's no point I'd rather people use their experiences as a basis to go and try and understand themselves and the world than I would try to change their mind to the truth we don't know the truth we know little bits we know a lot we know as much as we can know that nothing leaves the body and these experiences that there is no spirit, no soul and so on but so much more to find out so I can't do it myself so these people who've had these experiences actually they're important and they're the ones who can explore more and find out more one of the real sort of knee jerk responses with opinion changes just to remain passive and unconvinced that's fine I'm going to continue my merry way and not do much about it and yeah we're trying to provide students with the tools specifically to look at the data and to try not to remain passive and unconvinced figure out what would have looked like in other sorts of scenarios where it didn't happen just the way that it did I think it's absolutely foundational to being a good thinker that reminds me of two things one is a bit depressing it's when I used to do interviewing for admissions to the university and psychology degree and I would set some kind of challenging scenario as purely hypothetical what if it turned out that black people can't do this or some challenging thing I'm not saying it's true I'm just saying suppose it did what are the possible explanations now the good student the one I'm going to admit says well I don't think it's true but if it were it could be because of their upbringing it could be because of whatever it could be it could be how would I find out blah blah blah and the student I'm going to say no is going to go but that's not true but that's wrong how could you say that you know and that's sort of the rigidity but it also makes me think more about the kind of paranormal things that we're thinking about and the strange experiences that people have the the student I would want the student I would enjoy would go well I think that this happened but hang on a minute okay it's emotionally difficult it's challenging to me I don't like it but let me imagine a purely mechanistic explanation let me imagine an explanation in terms of a religion that I don't know much about or isn't mine let me imagine and they would be willing despite the it hurts I don't like this to do that now I've had a lot of experience in my life of that anguish I mean the world's a simple place if you know how it works and you know I'm in here I'm me this is who I am this is what I do that's how they were you know it's a simple place it's horrible it doesn't work as a life strategy but you feel you're going to be safe that way you can imagine me having started out with all these beliefs I mean I honestly believe that out there is this great psychic field and that I was going to be the great hero heroine of science who was going to change the world forever because I'd prove once and for all that a paranormal phenomena there aren't any this was not a comfortable time for it was horrible I'm wrong now also imagine me I mean not only with my crystal ball but I suppose I've got colour there's a bit of that left but you know the late 60s early 70s wafty clothes and headbands and wow peace man and you know all that and you know I looked everything about my life was like that I had to give up well let go of let go of all of that in order to move forward to ask questions to learn oh and I look back now good because you know I've found out so much also all that led me to exploring a whole lot of different things and the only one that stuck was meditation and I've been training in Zen for 30 years and that is also training in flexibility letting go openness to experience openness to different explanations and that training goes along very very well with a scientific mind that asks questions and doesn't take the first theory I come up with is the truth and that's it I'm personally fascinated by the whole mystery of consciousness how on earth can this brain be responsible for I don't even know the words should I say give rise to no that's wrong in some way related to this experience well there's always a this experience I can look into it I can inquire I can go and read books and try to understand how the visual system works my advice would be it's not about it's actually about who we are as a human being ask yourself who am I what am I how does this body do whatever it is that creates this I would say illusion that I'm in here looking out through the eyes so every moment is an opportunity for asking questions science is expanding there's so much to know and I know it's an old cliche but the more we know the more is to know so enjoy the questions that meet you every day and use those as the basis for your exploration and then you'll enjoy it as well as having to change your mind all the time and learn more so the goal of the course is to improve people's everyday thinking do you have any recommendations for how people in the course might improve their everyday thinking yes start with your intuitions watch yourself feel those intuitions coming up and question them because some of your intuitions will be fine um yeah I think if I lean on here it'll be fine but some of your other intuitions I'm in here looking out through my eyes I know what that is that person is nice that but a lot of your intuitions won't be so question your intuitions and be willing to give them up if there's a good reason to do so that's hard but yes some of those intuitions my name is Sue I think about consciousness