Susan Blackmore's Psychology Today blog posts

I think the context Sue describes was one of using a whole range of drugs over a period of time. Perhaps, rather like regular meditation, or regular inducement of OBEs via non-drug means, these activities can re-arrange some paths of the brain, whether deliberately or accidentally, to make an out of body experience occur more readily.

The real questions here are not so much over the actions of various drugs, but on how to consider the 'reality' of what happens in an OBE. I think Blackmore discounts it on the grounds that there were discrepancies between observations during the OBE of such things as chimneys or gutters on the rooftops, and subsequent checking of the physical world.

However, she is not the first nor the last to have noted such discrepancies. It seems it is common for the world in the OBE to differ from the present-day physical counterpart. But people still reach different conclusions on what this means. Blackmore's position is not the only possible one. Other OBE practitioners or experiencers reach different conclusions.

I agree that in general that's the crucial question about OBEs.

But I did also think it was interesting that Blackmore's initial OBE was preceded by hallucinations which she apparently attributed to cannabis. I amy be missing something, but her account gives me the impression that cannabis was the only drug she'd taken on that occasion. Maybe what seems most curious to me is that she sometimes almost presents her whole scientific career as a quest to understand what happened that night, but seems to discount those preceding hallucinations on very dubious grounds.

 Maybe what seems most curious to me is that she sometimes almost presents her whole scientific career as a quest to understand what happened that night, but seems to discount those preceding hallucinations on very dubious grounds.

It is possible that some people dissemble...

My takeaway, from Susan Blackmore 's shtick,  is that . I should have gone to college, gotten a graduate  degree, and made a comfortable living as an academic, Empty suit. 
She truly makes it appear effortless.

I think the context Sue describes was one of using a whole range of drugs over a period of time. Perhaps, rather like regular meditation, or regular inducement of OBEs via non-drug means, these activities can re-arrange some paths of the brain, whether deliberately or accidentally, to make an out of body experience occur more readily.

The real questions here are not so much over the actions of various drugs, but on how to consider the 'reality' of what happens in an OBE. I think Blackmore discounts it on the grounds that there were discrepancies between observations during the OBE of such things as chimneys or gutters on the rooftops, and subsequent checking of the physical world.

However, she is not the first nor the last to have noted such discrepancies. It seems it is common for the world in the OBE to differ from the present-day physical counterpart. But people still reach different conclusions on what this means. Blackmore's position is not the only possible one. Other OBE practitioners or experiencers reach different conclusions.

I'd want to know what the neighborhood was like around the building she was in. If I suddenly found myself in an OBE and drifting away from the building I was in, I know there's a good chance I could get turned around by the weird vantage point on things. Was there a building with old gutters and chimneys in the vicinity?

Evidently this is to promote the North-American edition of her book, "Seeing Myself: The new science of out-of-body experiences," which was published in the UK two years ago.

One thing I hadn't appreciated was that before her own OBE she experienced about half an hour of hallucinations (or "pseudo-hallucinations"), including the formation of a tunnel along which she rushed "accompanied by a thunderous noise as though I were a horse galloping down a tree-lined avenue towards a distant light." Apparently she viewed all this as "familiar drug effects" which were quite different from the out-of-body experience that followed. Evidently at the time she attributed them to a joint she was smoking.

But as far as I can see, visual hallucinations are actually quite uncommon as a result of cannabis. I'd have thought in her 50-year quest to understand this experience, a pertinent question would be whether she really experienced hallucinations whenever she used cannabis, and what that might imply. Another question would be whether that was really the only drug involved that night, or whether a real hallucinogen might have been responsible, perhaps after she'd been given it unwittingly.

Apparently in the last three months there have been ten more blog posts in this series. Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, here is the last one, in which she retells the story of her Out-of-Body Experience in the light of her current scientific understanding of what happened:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...-explained

On the role of cannabis in the initial half hour of hallucinations, it seems she now feels that was relatively minor. Cannabis is mentioned only three times:
My attention kept wandering and my short term memory was reduced by cannabis (Earleywine 2002). REM intrusion threatened (Nelson 2010) and I was on the verge of hallucinating even without that puff of cannabis.
In the near darkness and with my eyes shut, the primary visual cortex, V1, was getting no useful information from outside. With my hyperexcitable cortex (Braithwaite et al 2013) already disinhibited by the combination of sleep deprivation and cannabis, it went into random firing, producing an illusory central light and the form constants of spirals and tunnels (Cowan 1982).

I do find it difficult to make sense of this. In her first blog post she said this went on for about half an hour, but she took it to be "familiar drug effects." Surely it could be familiar only if she recognised it as an effect of drugs that she had experienced before, presumably several times. Now she says the only effects of the drug were a reduction of short-term memory and (in combination with sleep deprivation) a disinhibition of her "hyperexcitable cortex." This seems to imply she was prone to hallucinations anyway, even without drugs.

I haven't gone through this new explanation and compared it in detail with the previous accounts, but one glaring discrepancy that struck me is that in the account she wrote three days after the experience, there was about half an hour of moving through tunnels and seeing "places, which appeared very, very clearly. In more detail than if I had seen them real," and then the experience of being up near the ceiling developed and she was gently drifting about, opening her eyes "at times," keeping silent, or more or less so, keeping looking around and making slight exclamations. Then Vicki went out of the room to make coffee and Kevin said to Blackmore "Where are you?"

In yesterday's account, there is just a brief account of moving, then galloping, through a tunnel of trees, and then after Kevin said "Where are you, Sue?" she tried to picture her body but couldn't get a sense of an embodied self, and then constructed from memory a view from above and found herself floating near the ceiling and looking down.

In the original account there is a period of floating near the ceiling before Kevin asked her where she was. In the new one it was Kevin's asking her where she was that caused her to float near the ceiling. It's not reassuring when the sequence of events has to be rewritten to accommodate the explanation.