History · 1979–2007
The original PEAR Lab
For 28 years, an engineering lab at Princeton tested a question most scientists wouldn’t touch: can the human mind change the physical world? PEAR Club is named for it.
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
What the lab did
In 1979, Robert G. Jahn, then dean of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, opened a small laboratory in the basement of the Engineering Quadrangle to test whether human consciousness can affect physical systems. Brenda J. Dunne, a developmental psychologist, managed the lab for its entire 28-year run.
PEAR’s best-known experiments used random event generators, electronic devices that produce a stream of random bits, like a coin flipped over and over. Volunteer operators sat in front of a machine and tried, by intention alone, to push its output above chance, below chance, or leave it alone as a baseline. The lab also studied remote perception, in which one person tried to describe a distant place another person was visiting, and built a wall-sized machine that dropped thousands of balls through a grid of pegs to see whether intention could shift where they landed.
Across millions of trials, the team reported a small but persistent effect. The machines drifted in the direction operators intended, by about two or three bits in every ten thousand. Jahn and Dunne laid out their case in Margins of Reality (1987).
Most scientists were not persuaded. Critics questioned the statistics and the lack of independent confirmation, and a large replication with partner labs in Freiburg and Giessen, published in 2000, did not reproduce the main effect. PEAR closed in February 2007. Its work continues at the International Consciousness Research Laboratories.
- 1979
Robert Jahn founds PEAR in Princeton’s engineering school.
- 1987
Jahn and Dunne publish Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World.
- 1996
PEAR joins labs in Freiburg and Giessen to attempt a formal replication.
- 2000
The consortium reports positive but non-significant trends. The main effect does not replicate.
- 2007
The lab closes in February after 28 years.
- 2026
Princeton students found PEAR Club.
Try it yourself
Can you nudge a coin flipper?
This is a simple version of PEAR’s main experiment. Your browser flips 200,000 digital coins in about five seconds. With no one trying, heads and tails come out close to even, and the line wanders inside the shaded zone that ordinary luck covers. PEAR’s volunteers tried to push the line up or down with intention alone.
- Pick heads or tails.
- Focus on it while the coins flip.
- See whether the line leaves the shaded normal-luck zone.
Why we revived it
The lab closed in 2007. Its questions are still open.
Science still has no agreed account of how physical processes give rise to conscious experience. Congress has held hearings on unidentified anomalous phenomena, and NASA has commissioned a study of them. Psychedelic research is back at major universities. Serious people are working on these questions, and students rarely get to hear from them directly.
PEAR Club brings those researchers to Princeton, examines their claims carefully, and keeps a public record of what we make of them. Members don’t have to believe anything. We ask them to look closely and argue in good faith.