It’s run very informally. I don’t like administration much. I don’t like being pushed around so if anybody is stupid enough to put me in charge of anything I only run it in a sort of rather casual way, as casual as possible, because I believe in people having their own freedom, their own ideas, and I also think that people have fallow patches and every now and again do something silly, and I don’t think they should be automatically judged negatively, you know, in that sort of way. So you’ve got to allow a bit of time for people, so one of the fun things as far as I’m concerned is picking people with potentiality who then turn out to be good. This happens about one times out of ten, I turn out to be right, you know. An example which did turn out to be very nice was Sue Blackmore who’s a very charming lady whom I know you know, and she was a bit zany, wanted to do paranormal stuff and years ago I decided, from my father really, thinking about his work but there wasn’t much in it, well, I thought nothing in it actually. I didn’t really believe in telepathy or any of those things, but here was a young lady with lots of go about her, and she might prove me wrong so I thought that will be absolutely great, you see. So I took her on and gave her a space and so on and she’s made a tremendous success of her career, initially exploring the possibilities and looking at what work was being done, analysing it, then becoming more and more critical, in the end deciding that there’s absolutely nothing it in whatsoever in ten years. So she’s made two career successes, one showing that it was worth doing academically and, two, showing there’s nothing in it at the end of the day. But that was not a waste of time. She played that game well. Her personality sort of shone out and everybody appreciated that and it made people think ultimately as to how the brain works, what is consciousness and all the rest of it. The interesting thing here, I mean there are deep, mysterious questions such that although you say that ESP and all the paranormal stuff is nothing, it remains true that undoubtedly in the brain are weird things going on, particularly the fact that when I look at a red shirt, I see red; if somebody stands on my toe, it feels pain; if somebody scratches me, I feel a tickle, and it’s totally mysterious, in my opinion, at the moment, how that happens so if you say there’s no paranormal, in a way this is the very edge or beyond the edge of the understanding of the normal phenomena that we experience every single day of our lives all the time. And I think there’s a lesson there. It’s all very well to look at phenomena and cast them adrift because they are so weird but, in fact, our day to day experience is weird and I think incapable of understanding, and why I liked Sue is that she actually looked at the phenomena, then came to the conclusion that there’s nothing in those at all but then went on to look at consciousness which we all have and now puzzles and writes very nice books on what that final mystery is. Now, I regard that as a success and I’m incredibly pleased that I supported her in the early days when she was just a pretty nice girl, you know. That occasionally happened but basically I don’t like administration. I get bored by it. Occasionally, when you make a decision to take somebody on and so on, it works and you feel pleased but generally the minutiae, you know, of decision making and one person wanting a bigger room and somebody else wanting something else, and having to think about all that, I really very much dislike.
