From Dice to Electronics: Rhine's Legacy Goes Statistical

Micro-PK grew directly out of J. B. Rhine's 1930s dice experiments at Duke, in which subjects tried to mentally influence which face of a thrown die would land upward, an effect measured only statistically across large numbers of throws rather than seen directly. As electronic random number generators became available from the 1960s and 1970s, parapsychologists adopted them as a cleaner target, removing the mechanical variables of a physically thrown die, and reframed the research as testing whether human intention could bias a quantum or electronic source of randomness.

The most ambitious version of this research was the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, founded in 1979 by aerospace engineering professor Robert G. Jahn with collaborator Brenda Dunne, which spent 28 years running operators through millions of RNG trials, along with related "remote perception" experiments, publishing its methods and results openly in Jahn and Dunne's 1987 book Margins of Reality. PEAR reported statistically small but, its founders argued, cumulatively significant deviations from chance correlated with an operator's stated intention, and the lab became one of the most visible and most argued-over parapsychology programs in the world for its entire run.