A modern British
university is no place to think. That’s the sad conclusion I came to
after ten years of struggling in my secure academic job. What first
had seemed a magnificent opportunity – a great privilege – an
amazing step for someone who’d been hovering on the edges of
academia for so long – had become a burden. And I couldn’t stand it
anymore. Instead of reading and writing and thinking and arguing and
carrying out experiments to try to understand the nature of the
human mind or the mysteries of the universe, I was filling in forms,
attending meetings, and marking ever higher piles of increasingly
pedestrian essays. Just sometimes I had the joy of knowing I’d
inspired my students, or helped them design exciting experiments.
Just sometimes I even did some research, but mostly I seemed to be
wasting my brain away. So I left.
The job I
abandoned was Reader in Psychology at a large new university, where
I taught everything from huge classes in introductory psychology and
statistics to seminars on consciousness. Opinion among my colleagues
was divided between “You’re mad” and “You’re so brave. I wish I
could do it”. The deal was simple enough – give up the status, the
salary, the pension, the sick pay, a warm room, the equipment that
someone else buys and mends, for uncertainty and freedom. I had no
idea whether I could manage to cobble together enough work in the
way of radio, TV, writing and lecturing, to earn enough to survive.
But now, eight years later, I know I can – just about.
And would I go
back? No way. My idea of a commute is the two flights of stairs from
my bedroom to my study; my idea of work is to sit down at my desk
and think and read and write. When I was paid, I never seemed to get
any real work done. Now I’m paid little but I can work all I like,
and on whatever I like, from the mystery of consciousness or the
nature of mind, to genes, memes, and evolution in the cosmos.
This contrast
between funding and freedom raises fundamental questions about what
makes for the best science. Should government, or committees, or
elected representatives decide which research is likely to produce
measurable pay-offs, and then control the direction of research
accordingly? Or should scientists have the freedom to explore
wherever their results and imagination take them, knowing that
discoveries that change our understanding of the universe may have
no immediate payoff other than delight in knowledge itself, and that
it’s impossible, in advance, to know which lines of work will prove
productive?
It’s not
surprising to find that successful independents extol the virtues of
freedom. Jim Lovelock is best known for his Gaia theory; the
once-outrageous proposal that Earth behaves as a self regulating
organism. When he first proposed this strange way of thinking about
planets in the late 1960s, his idea was largely ignored, then
scoffed at, and even after a few decades the general response was to
reject it as fanciful. But whether he is right about Gaia or not,
his proposals eventually became part of mainstream discussion and
have caused a dramatic shift in the way many of us think about
planet earth and our own responsibilities. Lovelock himself is now
at the forefront of the environmental movement, claiming that if we
greedy humans don’t curb our consumption fast and drastically, Gaia
will exact its revenge.
“I doubt if anyone
who is not independent can speak freely and honestly” he says “The
constraints can be benign and well intended but they are
unavoidable.” He had degrees in chemistry, medicine and biophysics,
and was a Professor of chemistry collaborating in research at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California when, in the early 1960s, he
gave up his conventional career to work independently. When funding
bodies rejected his proposals he funded his research expeditions
from his own income, mostly by designing scientific instruments in
his home workshop in Cornwall. Subsequently, vast sums have been
spent on repeating and extending this early research. “I could never
have worked on Gaia other than as an independent” he says.
Other independents
have private means; among them the courageous Lady Amanda Neidpath,
who runs the Beckley Foundation. She is fighting against the
restrictions not only of mainstream academia but of drug policies
that outlaw the very substances she wants to investigate. Drug
prohibition means that, while millions of people in Britain
regularly use psychedelic drugs, almost no research on their effects
is allowed. Yet Neidpath believes that drugs like LSD and psilocybin
can have positive effects for the terminally ill and as an aid in
psychotherapy, as well as being invaluable tools for neuroscience.
More controversially she argues that having access to a fuller
spectrum of states of consciousness can be beneficial for
individuals as well as for society as a whole, which is not so crazy
when you realise that almost all other cultures systematically use
drugs and other methods of inducing altered states with great skill.
After long battles, she has finally established the first research
project on the effects of LSD with human subjects for over 35 years.
“Being independent is a great advantage” she says. “My ideas are
fresher. I’m not chained by the system.”
Understandably,
many independents work on fringe topics. Rupert Sheldrake studies
paranormal claims, and his hypotheses are generally considered way
beyond the pale. An early high-flyer, Sheldrake gained a double
first, a research fellowship at Cambridge, and a Royal Society
Fellowship. He made significant discoveries concerning the chemistry
of morphogenetic fields: groups of cells that respond to chemical
signals so as to build structure in developing organisms, and his
research career looked bright. “I knew that if I’d stayed there I
could have become a Professor, a head of Department, or the
Principle of a College, like so many of my friends.” he told me. But
he chafed against the narrow view of living things entailed in that
research and instead resigned his fellowship. He took a job in
agriculture in India, where he could pursue a more holistic vision
of living things. Living cheaply, in Indian style, he spent more
than a year in an Ashram writing a book, and all the while saved
enough money to fund many years of independent research back home.
That book was A
New Science of Life, published in 1981. I remember the fuss at
the time An editorial in New Scientist called his ideas
“completely scatty” and Nature called it “a book for burning”
– a statement that only fuelled debate and increased sales. From
then on Sheldrake was able to earn enough from book sales to ease
the troubles of self-funded research; books like “Dogs that know
when their owners are coming home” and “The Sense of Being Stared
at” among others. His research involves the extended mind and a
process he calls morphic resonance. The idea is that when a certain
shape or structure has occurred many times, it is more likely to
occur again. This, he claims, can explain telepathy, because ideas
in one person’s mind can be shaped by morphic resonance with another
mind. These paranormal claims are perennially popular, and people
flock to take part in Sheldrake’s experiments on telepathy,
clairvoyance and precognition.
Sheldrake
complains that science today is determined more by big business and
climbing corporate career ladders than by soaring journeys of the
mind. “The present system paralyses creativity, inhibits curiosity,
and is stultifying science. The more who work independently the
better.” he says.
Perhaps more
surprising is to find that even the most successful of conventional
scientists are also complaining about restrictions. Just this year,
with the threatened axing of large projects in physics and space
research, the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, decried the unfortunate
tendency for “for funds to be more tightly micromanaged from the
centre.” Many top scientists are prepared to work in universities,
despite poor pay, only because they can get funding for the research
they want to do. Losing that freedom could threaten Britain’s place
as a world leader in science.
So is more
intellectual freedom unequivocally a good thing? Is it good for
science itself? And is it good for the individual scientists who
strike out on their own? Some think not.
Nicholas Humphrey
has been on both sides and concludes that being
independent can be a mixed blessing. Back in the 1970s he was a
leading
researcher on primate vision at Cambridge, studied mountain gorillas
in the
wild, and wrote oft-cited papers on the social function of
intelligence.
Then in 1983 he left his secure university job to make a television
series
called "The inner eye" for Channel Four. He remembers the historian
E. P.
Thompson advising him "Whatever you do, don't give up your
institutional
base" (as Thompson himself had done, to his own regret). "If you
want to
change things you're much best placed to do it from inside". And as
it
turned out Humphrey's experiment with freedom was indeed nearly a
disaster,
when after the making the tv programs, he found himself academically
side-lined and without a salary. "It's great to be independent" he
told me,
"provided you have independent means and lots of friends. If you
don't, the
chances are you'll end up scraping a living, doing things that are
the
antithesis of free research." After a few years he had had enough
and was
longing to get back into the main stream. He was rescued by a rich
patron and
was able to claw his way back. He now has a distinguished
professorship
at the LSE. "Financial security makes all the difference" he says.
"That,
plus the sense of belonging. There's no point in being right if
nobody is
listening."
For Dylan Evans
going independent was also a double-edged sword. Evans was Senior
Lecturer in Intelligent Autonomous Systems at UWE, Bristol when he
decided to give up the conventional research life to conduct "an
experiment in Utopia". He set up an eco-camp on a plot of land in
the Scottish Highlands and invited people of all ages and walks of
life to join him there, living according to a future scenario in
which Britain suffers drastic climate change, cheap oil is gone, and
conventional society has broken down. "I learned a lot" he says "but
at a high price - my experiment in Scotland was actually quite
traumatic." Indeed, he became increasingly concerned as the
volunteers took the scenario as a rehearsal for a real collapse.
After nine months Evans left a group of volunteers still living
there and returned home, nursing his wounds. "I have seriously
revised my previously romantic ideas about the joys of being
independent" he said. He even admits to a "renewed appreciation for
the value of all that institutional crap that I used to love
criticising." Indeed he is now making his way back into the academic
fold with a post at University College Cork.
I scarcely
considered such traumatic possibilities when I decided to go
independent myself. I could certainly be accused of being foolhardy
and ill-prepared, but happily my own romantic ideas remain intact
(at least some of them), I still avoid the “institutional crap”, and
I have become neither lonely nor despondent. I should also explain
that my current phase as an independent is not my first; I spent
years working alone long before my decade in employment. In those
early days I was obsessed with the paranormal, and convinced that my
brilliant theory of telepathy was right and all those closed-minded
scientists who said it was impossible were wrong. But unlike
Sheldrake, I soon came to change my mind.
My obsession began
when, as a student in Oxford, I had a dramatic out-of-body
experience. Late one night, smoking and listening to music with
friends, I began travelling down a dark tunnel towards a bright
light. When someone asked me “Where are you Sue?” I suddenly found
myself apparently looking down on the scene, and then able to travel
freely wherever I thought to go. After more than two hours of
extraordinary, realistic, and joyful visions, it seemed that my
individual selfhood was gone and everything was one.
This experience
was completely inexplicable by anything I had learnt in the
physiology and psychology I was studying. Indeed it took another
twenty years before neuroscientists found out how to induce
out-of-body experiences, and pinpointed those parts of the brain
implicated in causing them. So perhaps it’s forgivable that I jumped
to all sorts of crazy conclusions. Although my attempts to verify
what I had seen met with mixed results – the gutters on the college
roof were quite unlike those I’d hovered above in my travels, for
example – I nonetheless became convinced that my spirit, or soul, or
astral body, had left my physical body, had paranormal powers, and
was capable of independent consciousness and will. This became my
passion and reason for living – to prove the paranormal basis of
consciousness.
Naturally I was
not going to get funding for such a project. My tutors tried to
dissuade me from abandoning a proper career in research psychology,
but I was determined. I found a part-time job teaching in a
polytechnic and a Professor at the University of Surrey who was
prepared to take me on, and began work for a PhD on the paranormal.
According to my
grand theory; memory was not stored in the brain as everyone assumed
(and we now know to be true) but depended on some kind of psychic or
telepathic field. I devised predictions concerning ESP and memory
and set to work on a long series of experiments. I found no ESP.
Week after week, and month after month, I kept changing the
conditions, correcting errors, trying different methods, and still
no ESP. Other parapsychologists around the world were quick with
suggestions – try young children (their natural psychic powers are
undimmed by nasty education, you see), try imagery training (we’re
all naturally telepathic when our minds are freed), try sensory
deprivation, try Tarot cards.
I kept trying,
until one day I simply stopped believing. I’m not sure whether it
was the combined evidence, the realisation that my theory was
neither new nor coherent, or just the exhaustion of getting nowhere,
but I remember the day on which I changed my mind. It was as though
everything I had believed in had been hanging on by a tiny thread
and the thread finally broke. “What if” I thought “what if none of
it’s true – none at all?” The world looked a very different place
without the psychic lenses.
People often ask
me whether I was disheartened, or depressed, or angry that I’d
wasted so much time. But I wasn’t. And it wasn’t a waste of time for
me personally. During those years I learned much about research
methods and statistics, interviewed people who’d had amazing
experiences, and learned a great deal about myself. Perhaps above
all I learned how to change my mind when I found I was wrong –
surely a crucial skill for any scientist.
Was it then a
waste of time for science itself. To some extent I think it was. If
telepathy and precognition could be demonstrated, or souls shown to
leave the body, this would have explosive consequences for science.
Indeed it would affect not only psychology but our entire
understanding of time, space and matter. But finding out that they
don’t is a damp squib. I couldn’t blame those who said “I told you
so.” It was, after all, a scientific gamble, and a poor one. All I
learned was what most scientists believed all along.
After this
anti-conversion I threw myself into research on altered states of
consciousness, the brain basis of out-of-body and near-death
experiences, and why people hold false beliefs. Throughout these
years I managed on small grants from private organisations and by
teaching evening classes and a few lectures at Bristol University.
Then increasingly I was asked to play “rent-a-sceptic”, appearing on
radio and TV programmes with a hundred people who’d seen a ghost, or
a studio full of alien abductees, to “provide balance” by saying
“it’s all in the mind”. Though it’s unpopular to say so I think
being a mother with young kids was relevant. I felt able to stay at
home like so many other mothers in my village, with the difference
that I took every chance, while the children slept or played, to
work on my book or analyse some data. Then, at some point, I had to
earn real money, and that’s when I applied for my first proper job.
If it hadn’t been
for my early obsession with the paranormal I would never have chosen
this independent life, and it must be obvious that most independents
work on highly quirky subjects. Jim Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis was
considered completely beyond the pale until the human threat to
Earth’s climate became obvious. Much of Nick Humphrey’s work was on
the origins of consciousness, at a time when consciousness itself
was barely mentionable in mainstream science. He also worked on
paranormal claims and, like me, became increasingly sceptical the
more he investigated.
Is Sheldrake
wrong? I believe so. I did so many of my own experiments that
failed; I investigated so many other peoples’ experiments and found
them wanting, and I investigated so many claims of amazing
paranormal feats that turned out to be false, that I think the
chances of his being right are negligible. But they are not zero.
And here I differ from many other scientists. I am positively glad
that Sheldrake is doing what he is. The paranormal is believed in by
so many people, and would be so important for science were it true,
that we must have at least a few scientists trying to find out. And
that, given the way conventional scientific funding works, means we
need a few crazy independents who have found some way of funding
their work and will carry on alone regardless.
Is there a danger?
Humphrey thinks so, and quotes John Maynard Keynes who said “It is
astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one
thinks too long alone.” My own ideas, like those of Lovelock,
Humphrey or Sheldrake, may indeed be foolish. Some of mine have been
downright wrong. I was wrong about telepathy, wrong about memory,
and I have had several completely batty theories about
consciousness. I may still be wrong about memes, consciousness and
the illusion of free will, but I prefer to take that risk than lose
the chance of pursuing my ideas during the one life I have.
