Honorton's central idea was that if there were any faint anomalous signal, ordinary sensory traffic would drown it, and that the way to test the claim was therefore to quiet the senses rather than to look for stronger psychics. He took the ganzfeld, a technique perceptual psychologists had developed in the 1930s to study what the visual system does when given a completely uniform field, and repurposed it: halved translucent spheres over the eyes under red light, white noise through headphones, about half an hour of it, producing a mild and reproducible altered state without drugs or hypnosis.
A receiver in that state described whatever came to mind while a sender in a separate room concentrated on one randomly chosen image; afterwards the receiver ranked four candidate images, giving a chance hit rate of twenty-five percent. The choice of instrument mattered more than the particular results. It gave the field a procedure that was cheap, standardised, and above all describable in enough detail that another laboratory could run exactly the same thing, which card-guessing had never quite managed. Honorton worked first in the dream laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn and then, from 1979, at his own Psychophysical Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, where the procedure was automated end to end.