Over a period of 28 years, scientists at Princeton University’s engineering department, led by Prof. Robert Jahn and Dr. Brenda Dunne, researched how human intention impacts the world around them and other consciousness-related phenomena. It was triggered by findings that fighter pilots in their planes seemed to influence the readouts of the sensitive instruments on their dashboards through their inner states. After many years and thousands of experiments, they demonstrated that human intention does indeed affect otherwise random events around us. They also showed how collective group experiences influence randomness.

For most of their research they used something called a Random Event Generator, which uses a quantum tunnelling process to generate a series of 1s and 0s at random. They used graphic readouts on a computer screen to represent those 1s and 0s (e.g. a line on a screen that goes up with more 1s and down with more 0s). Test subjects had to try and influence the line without physically interacting with the computer (even from the other side of the world).

By the end of their 28 years of research in 2007 the evidence that human intention and our inner states impact on the world around us was highly significant (1:1 billion statistical probability that what they found was chance).

This course tells the story of the PEAR lab, featuring original video, audio and written material from the two key people who led the PEAR project, Dean of the Princeton University School of Engineering Dr Robert Jahn and psychologist Dr Brenda Dunne.

Having reviewed each week’s materials, participants join Dr. Peter Merry and Dr. Wolfhardt Janu in an interactive seminar to explore the content. Peter and Wolf currently work with the original PEAR equipment at Wyrd Experience, where it is on loan from the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL), set up by PEAR to continue their work. They have built on the original technology to develop research and consumer applications.