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.
Maimonides Medical Center
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. It was at Maimonides that he developed the ganzfeld technique — placing a subject in a mild state of sensory deprivation on the theory that ordinary sensory input drowns out any weaker "signal" involved in ESP.
Psychophysical Research Laboratories
In 1979, Honorton founded the Psychophysical Research Laboratories (PRL) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he continued ganzfeld research and also investigated micro-psychokinesis using random number generators. 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.
Koestler Parapsychology Unit
In 1991, Honorton moved to the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, where he began building an automated "autoganzfeld" testing system, continuing the same experimental line begun at Maimonides. 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.
"Does Psi Exist?"
The manuscript Honorton had been preparing was completed and published posthumously by Bem in 1994 as "Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer" in Psychological Bulletin, arguing that the accumulated ganzfeld results constituted reliable evidence for psi. The paper drew significant criticism, including a 1999 attempted replication and meta-analysis by Richard Wiseman and Julie Milton that failed to reproduce the claimed effect, and further methodological objections from psychologist Ray Hyman, with whom Honorton had earlier co-authored a joint 1986 communiqué on the ganzfeld controversy while he was still alive.
Legacy
Honorton's automated 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.