How the brain creates heaven: The philosophy of psychedelics with Susan Blackmore

“I very recently had the most fantastic opportunity,” Susan Blackmore tells me. “I was invited to give a lecture in Mexico on my latest ideas about consciousness at a cognition conference. And the guy who invited me said, ‘Well, we’re also going to have a shamanic surprise.’ Now, there are all the reasons not to go to Mexico — I’m old, don’t like traveling so much, and there are the ecological implications, and so on. But a shamanic surprise? I’m going.”

“It turns out he knows a Huichol shaman very well, and we had a… well, a fairly indescribable, absolutely ghastly night of feeling ill. We had to endure it. And then, in a sweat lodge the next morning… honestly, my body was saying, ‘You’re dying, you’re dying, you’re going to die!’ and my brain’s saying, ‘Of course you’re not going to die!’ But the aftereffects, psychologically, of all of this were wonderful. They were pretty amazing.”

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I talked with the celebrated cognitive scientist and philosopher Susan Blackmore. We discussed panpsychism, AI, and paradigm shifts, but inevitably gravitated to her work and thoughts on parapsychology. Blackmore started out investigating “parapsychological claims” — out-of-body experiences, religious encounters, and stories of meeting ghosts. She spent a lot of her career debunking these parapsychological claims. But that doesn’t mean she thinks there’s nothing worth investigating in stories of extraordinary cognitive experiences. In fact, Susan often takes a variety of hallucinogenic drugs to research “supercognitive” experiences — those that seem to bring you out of yourself.

Here we explore the philosophy of tripping.

What psychedelics are not

“What doesn’t interest me,” Blackmore tells me, “and what I don’t want to read about is claims of people who have had amazing experiences. That they’ve ‘gone somewhere else’ they couldn’t possibly have gone, or they saw something they couldn’t possibly have known, or people who’ve been to heaven and come back. I’ve read too much of that. A long, long time ago, I discovered you know how out-of-body experiences work and why they don’t need a woo-woo beyond-the-body kind of explanation.”

The reason Blackmore is different from a lot of skeptical scientists or philosophers is that she started out being sympathetic and open to the idea of parapsychology. When she was studying at Oxford University, Blackmore had an out-of-body experience that felt intensely, vividly real. This is how she recounts the event in her book Seeing Myself: The New Science of Out-of-Body Experiences:

“I sat with two friends listening to music, and when I smoked a little hash, I began rushing down a tunnel, then floating on the ceiling, and then traveling, as it seemed, all over the world. There were many bizarre irregularities in what I saw in my travels, yet everything seemed so utterly vivid and real, and I felt so very alive and alert, that I was convinced my soul had left my body — and even that I would survive physical death.”

It felt so real that Blackmore was compelled to study what was happening in the brain during such experiences. “I became convinced of ghosts and poltergeists, witchcraft and magic, clairvoyance and psychic phenomena. I decided then and there to become a parapsychologist and prove to all the ‘closed-minded’ scientists that they were wrong.”

Both the scientific evidence and the philosophical arguments seemed to say otherwise. The more Blackmore looked into all this, the more she realized two things. First was “the total lack of convincing evidence for floating souls — the sort of evidence I spent so long looking for.” And the second was that there are a lot of very good neuroscientific explanations for these processes.

No less real

Blackmore still enjoys taking drugs and argues there is a lot of value in parapsychological experiences — even if they are not proof of anything paranormal. As Blackmore wrote in 1987, “The experience itself is no less ‘real’ than any other experience and may even feel more so, but judged against the physical stimulus it is, just like visual illusions, in error.” And, three decades later, modern science agrees. In his 2021 book, Being You, Anil Seth frames consciousness as a “controlled hallucination.” In spiritual states, the prediction machinery of the brain recalibrates, loosening the grip of everyday ego. A self-induced chemical event doesn’t make the experience less real — but it does reframe what “real” even means.

What Blackmore and Seth are arguing is that our conscious experiences, including spiritual highs, are brain-generated constructs that, while subjectively real, never offer a completely accurate representation of external reality. But that is what the brain does all the time — it’s creating, filtering, interpreting, and doctoring “reality.” In this sense, spiritual highs aren’t glitches in the system — they are the system, pushed to its outer edge. Rather than dismissing them, thinkers like Blackmore and Seth invite us to treat these moments as windows onto the architecture of consciousness itself. Their intensity doesn’t prove they reveal another world — but they might reveal how this one is built.

The meditative effect

Knowing the neuroscience behind these experiences doesn’t reduce their importance or feeling in any way. If anything, Blackmore finds the neuroscience of these kinds of hallucinations enhances the experiences. It adds another layer to what is already a deeply profound moment. Nor are these kinds of “parapsychological” states necessarily drug-induced. This is one of Blackmore’s recent experiences:

“I’ve just, a couple of weeks ago, come back from a ten-day online retreat. It was about the Jhanas, and practicing the Jhanas, which are a series of eight increasingly deep meditational states that you get to through concentration. They’re really fascinating. And I’ve had one or two of them spontaneously and in other situations.

But, I’m really fascinated by the neuroscience of what’s going on in our brains that does this. The actual Jhana’s teacher thinks that the first Jhana, which kind of invokes this ‘energy.’ There’s all these spooky stories about subtle energies and chakras and stuff like that, but he reckons – the actual teacher reckons — that it’s a self-induced dopamine rush, which then decays into neuroadrenaline and produces the next stage. I just love the idea that there can be neuroscientific explanations for these things.”

If I am being honest, I would once describe myself as one of those “closed-minded” scientist (leaning) types who slightly sneers at parapsychological claims. But over my interview with Blackmore, I’ve come to appreciate spiritual highs for what they are — not as evidence of a higher realm, but a deeper access to our own. The brain, in states of meditation, ritual, or psychedelia, is not some portal to the divine — but it allows us to see the machinery of perception itself.

Blackmore’s work doesn’t kill the mystery; it relocates it. The fact that awe, at-oneness, or ego-dissolution can be traced to neurochemical cascades doesn’t make them meaningless. On the contrary — it suggests that transcendence is a native feature of human consciousness, not a bug, and that our most profound moments may be the brain briefly glimpsing its own architecture and mistaking it for heaven.