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Revision as of 12:42, 29 July 2026
Charles Henry Honorton (5 February 1946 – 4 November 1992) was an American parapsychologist best known for pioneering the ganzfeld technique for testing claimed extrasensory perception, and for later developing its automated successor at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit in Edinburgh.
Early life
Honorton developed an interest in consciousness and the paranormal as a child, and as a teenager corresponded directly with J. B. Rhine, spending summers at Rhine's Duke University parapsychology laboratory. He studied at the University of Minnesota from 1965 to 1966, during which time he served as research coordinator for the Minnesota Society for Psychic Research.
Career
In 1974, Honorton joined Stanley Krippner and Montague Ullman's dream telepathy research programme at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, eventually becoming director of its Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics, and it was there that he first developed the ganzfeld technique. In 1979, he founded the Psychophysical Research Laboratories (PRL) in Princeton, New Jersey, continuing ganzfeld research alongside investigations into micro-psychokinesis. He remained an active member of the Parapsychological Association throughout this period, serving as its president in 1975 and later receiving its Exceptional Contribution Award in 1988.
In 1991, Honorton moved to the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, where he began building an automated "autoganzfeld" testing system. He was working on a manuscript with Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem summarising this research when he died suddenly of a heart attack on 4 November 1992, at the age of 46. The manuscript was completed and published posthumously by Bem in 1994 — for the full account of this paper and the debate that followed, see Ganzfeld Experiment.
Legacy
Honorton's ganzfeld methodology remains one of the most closely examined experimental paradigms in parapsychology, cited by proponents as the field's strongest evidence for psi and by critics as a demonstration of how subtle methodological flaws can be mistaken for a genuine effect.