Building the Experiment the Communique Described

Honorton's laboratory in Princeton rebuilt the ganzfeld as a machine. A computer selected the target from the pool using a hardware source rather than a person or a table of numbers, controlled the playback to the sender, timed the session, presented the four candidate images to the receiver in a randomised order at the end, and recorded the judgement, so that no human being involved in a session knew the target while the session was running. The two rooms were separately shielded and separated, with the sender's room isolated so that no sound could pass. Each of these features answers a specific line in the 1986 document.

The reported outcome across eleven series and 240 participants was a hit rate of roughly thirty-two percent where twenty-five was expected, which is a small effect by the standards of a laboratory demonstration and a large one by the standards of this literature. It was presented to mainstream psychology in Psychological Bulletin in 1994, in a paper co-authored with Daryl Bem, in language deliberately pitched at readers with no prior interest in the subject. One detail of the automation is easy to miss and mattered a great deal to the argument. Because the computer selected and presented the four candidate images at the judging stage, the order in which they appeared was randomised too, which closed a route by which an experimenter's unconscious preference could favour the target.