Charles Honorton

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.

The most unusual thing Honorton did was not an experiment. In the early 1980s the skeptical psychologist Ray Hyman published a detailed critique of the pooled ganzfeld results, listing problems with randomisation, with the possibility of sensory leakage between rooms, and with the selective reporting of successful series. Instead of answering in kind, Honorton worked with him, and in 1986 the two published a joint communique in the Journal of Parapsychology. In it they agreed that the accumulated results were unlikely to be the product of chance or selective reporting alone, while continuing to disagree entirely about whether the cause was psi or an uncontrolled artefact, and they set out together the automation, randomisation and documentation standards that any future study would need to satisfy before either of them would treat it as decisive. This is rare.

Most long-running scientific disputes never reach a shared statement of what would count as evidence, and the ganzfeld is the one corner of parapsychology where both sides wrote that statement down. Honorton then built the automated series intended to meet it, and reported another above-chance result, published with Daryl Bem in 1994. He died in 1992 at forty-six, before the argument over whether the standard had actually been met had run its course, and it is still running.