PEAR: twenty-eight years of Princeton looking for mind over matter
An Ivy League engineering laboratory ran experiments on whether intention can influence random systems, from 1979 until 2007. The effect they reported was real in the statistical sense and vanishingly small in every other.
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The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory was founded in 1979 by Robert Jahn, then dean of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, and run with Brenda Dunne until it closed in 2007. Its position inside a serious engineering faculty made it the most institutionally respectable psi laboratory that has ever existed.
What was tested
Principally one thing, repeated an enormous number of times. A random event generator produces a stream of bits from electronic noise. An operator sits in front of it and intends the output to run high, or low, or is instructed not to intend anything. The question is whether the intention condition shifts the distribution.
PEAR also ran remote perception experiments, but the generator work is what the laboratory is known for and what its argument rests on.
Why the size matters so much
An effect that only appears across millions of trials is extremely difficult to distinguish from a subtle systematic bias — in the equipment, in how sessions were started and stopped, in which data were retained.
PEAR worked hard on this and their apparatus was carefully built. But the smaller an effect is, the larger the share of it that could be produced by an artefact nobody has thought of, and one bit in ten thousand is very small indeed.
The replication
The most important result in PEAR’s history is one its own team took part in. A three-laboratory consortium, including PEAR, ran a coordinated replication using a common protocol, and reported that the original effect did not replicate.
That is close to decisive, and it is to the laboratory’s credit that it participated and published. It is also rarely mentioned in popular accounts of PEAR, which tend to stop at "Princeton found evidence for mind over matter".
What remains
A very large, carefully collected dataset, an unexplained deviation within it, and a failed replication. That is the honest inventory.
PEAR is worth covering because it is the best-resourced, longest-running and most respectable attempt anyone has made at this question, and because the way it ended tells you more about the field than the way it began.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
Has the PEAR dataset been independently re-analysed?
Decades of raw data exist. An independent analysis looking specifically for systematic artefacts would be valuable and does not appear to have been done.
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Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World
Robert G. Jahn and Brenda J. Dunne, Harcourt · 1 Jan 1987 · no public copy located
Mind/machine interaction consortium: PortREG replication experiments
Journal of Scientific Exploration · 1 Jan 2000 · no public copy located
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