Founding at Princeton

Robert G. Jahn was an aerospace engineer and Princeton's dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science when, in 1979, a student's interest in psychokinesis experiments led him to open a small laboratory to test whether human intention could influence the statistical output of electronic random event generators, machines producing streams of random binary digits from electronic noise.

Jahn justified the project to a skeptical administration as a legitimate engineering anomalies question, arguing that if operators could reliably bias supposedly random hardware even slightly, the effect would matter for any system that depended on true randomness, a framing that let him house the lab within engineering rather than psychology. He recruited Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist trained at the University of Chicago, as laboratory manager, and the two directed PEAR together for its entire existence with a small permanent staff supplemented by students and visiting researchers. The lab's core protocol asked volunteer operators to try to mentally influence a random event generator's output toward a pre-specified direction across very large numbers of trials, on the reasoning that even a tiny, consistent statistical deviation from chance, if genuine, would accumulate into a detectable signal only across millions of trials rather than a handful of dramatic ones.