Charles "Chuck" Honorton 
(1946 - 1992)

As a teenager, he corresponded with Dr J B Rhine and, while he was still a high school student, he travelled from his home in Minnesota to Durham, North Carolina to spend his summer months at the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University.

Honorton collaborated with Dr Stanley Krippner and Dr Montague Ullman at Maimonides Medical Center (Brooklyn, New York) in the classic "dream telepathy" experiments. Honorton later became the Director of the Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics at Maimonides. In 1979, he founded the Psychophysical Research Laboratories (PRL) in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1991, he went to the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, Scotland) to pursue a Ph.D. degree. He died of heart failure on November 4, 1992. He left an extensive collection of publications of his years in parapsychological research.


GANZFELD AND RNG RESEARCH:
A Memorial to Charles Honorton
By Mario Varvoglis
Author of the Psi Explorer CD-ROM

I arrived at Maimonides in 1974 as a kind of tourist, prodded by a friend who was patiently trying to overcome my skepticism— and ignorance—about parapsychology. Indeed, I was converted, largely because of Honorton’s work; but for several years I remained only a part-time volunteer at Maimonides, squeezing in what time I could between undergraduate studies and jobs to pay the bills. It was only toward the latter few years at Maimonides and, of course, in my years at Psychophysical Research Laboratories (PRL), from 1979 to 1985, that I can claim to have worked closely with Chuck.

The Early Ganzfeld Work
At the time I arrived at the Maimonides lab, the original Honorton and Harper (1974) study had already been completed. Several others, using identical methodologies, were in process. As in the earlier study, the sender viewed a viewmaster reel randomly selected out of a large number of possibilities and attempted to mentally convey to the receiver its visual elements and overall theme. The receiver, located in an Industrial Acoustics Corp. (IAC) sound - isolation room, was put into ganzfeld (wearing halved ping-pong balls over the eyes and headphones with "white noise" over the ears) and was asked to "think out loud," reporting all thoughts, images, or feelings that came to mind. The experimenter, who was "blind" as to the target viewmaster reel, was situated between the sender’s and receiver’s rooms, and monitored the latter’s mentation via intercom. At the end of the sending period, the receiver would be taken out of ganzfeld and, presented with four viewmaster reels, would attempt to select the target, based on his or her earlier impressions.

Assessment of psi effects for an experimental series was thus based upon a statistical comparison of the total number of direct "hits" against the expected 25% hit rate.

Terry and Honorton (1976) report two of these follow-up ganzfeld studies. The first involved 12 undergraduate students who were following an experimental parapsychology course given by Honor-ton. The cumulative result, based upon 27 sessions, was significant (p = .003). The second study, involving 6 self-selected sender-receiver pairs contributing 10 sessions each, yielded highly significant results (p = .00059). Also highly successful was a shorter series (Honorton, 1976) involving rather unusual conditions: Sessions were conducted under the cameras of different TV crews. The receivers correctly selected the target in 6 out of the 7 sessions (p = .0013), suggesting that such high-pressure situations may actually be conducive for experienced subjects (Honorton, 1977b). Significant results (p = .025) were also obtained in a series with 17 visiting scientists and journalists contributing one session each (Honorton, 1977b).

As in the original Honorton and Harper study, all these experiments provided not only clear-cut statistical evidence for psi, but also a wealth of strong qualitative correspondences. While pointing to the real value of the ganzfeld procedure, these correspondences also highlighted the weakness of our quantitative evaluation method, which essentially reduced all that richness to a single psi trial with a ¼ probability of a hit. Noting the insensitivity and wastefulness of this approach, Charles Honorton (1975) proposed an alternative way for evaluating free-response psi material. The method yielded analytical data on the information content of the target, the subject’s mentation, and their correspondence. By coding each target as a unique combination of 10 possible content-categories (color, activity, mythical characters, animals, human characters, artifacts, food, body parts, architecture, nature scenes) and coding the receiver’s mentation using the same categorization scheme, we could immediately derive the number of matches, ranging from 0 to 10. The approach thus allowed for more precise comparisons of psi information transfer rates under different conditions, while also promising to enhance the efficiency of free-response research paradigms. As Honorton (1975) showed, given that each session would involve 10 independent guesses, with a binomial expectation of 5, a statistically meaningful result could be obtained even within a single session (i.e., with 8 or more matches out of 10).

To ensure category independence, the target pool had to consist of all possible combinations of presence or absence of the 10 content categories, ranging from 0000000000 for a target showing just a black and white geometric shape to 1111111111 for one with instances of all 10 categories present. This meant that 210 or 1,024 targets had to be composed, each one showing the presence of just those content categories its code prescribed. If, for example, a target code was 1 just for body parts and food, the selected image could only show some food (without showing, say, a table, or forks and knives), and only a pair of hands, or a mouth, or nose (without showing someone’s full face). Needless to say, construction of the binary target pool was a major project. When I arrived at Maimonides in 1974, Jim Terry and Sharon Harper and others were right in the middle of this, and they immediately channeled my budding curiosity about psi research into several weeks of cutting and pasting magazine images.

The first study involving the binary code target material (Terry, Tremmel, Kelly, Harper, & Barker, 1976) sought to establish the utility of this approach. Thirty volunteer sender-receiver pairs were divided into two equal groups. In one, receivers went through the ganzfeld mentation period prior to deciding which content categories were present versus absent in the target; in the other group, they simply guessed. The results were significant for the ganzfeld group (p = .018), and nonsignificant for the control group. This study thus pointed both to the utility of abstract coding schemes in free-response research and to the general effectiveness of the ganzfeld procedure (also suggested by an independent study by Braud, Wood, & Braud, 1975).

In parallel with this study, Smith, Tremmel, and Honorton (1976) undertook a very interesting investigation of the sender’s role in the ganzfeld. Twenty sender-receiver pairs contributed two sessions each. In one, the target was presented to the sender for 10 minutes; in the other it was presented tachistoscopically for 1 millisecond. The sender was then put into ganzfeld and asked to "think out loud," just as the receiver did. At the end of the session, both sender and receiver encoded their mentation in terms of the 10 content categories. Overall psi results were significant (p = .0 15) and, interestingly enough, were comparable to results for the senders’ retrieval rate (p = .0 16). Even more interesting was the finding that the overall significance for psi results was largely due to the condition in which the sender had been exposed to the target subliminally. However, a similar study conducted around the same time, and involving 17 subjects, yielded nonsignificant results in all conditions (Terry, 1976).

The binary target pool was one of Charles Honorton’s many innovative efforts to enhance the replicability and efficiency of psi research; Honorton’s initial hope was that this pool could become a powerful standardized tool for laboratories engaged in ganzfeld or other free-response research. But while the above studies showed its overall utility in free-response research, they did not demonstrate its superiority in terms of results (e.g., in effect size). Nor did they demonstrate that this approach really advanced our understanding of the psi process itself. Though we expected it to yield a more detailed picture of the types of information best communicated through psi, we found that the overly literal orientation of the content categories led to an insensitivity to metaphorical, synaesthetic, or global facets of the ganzfeld experience, and just ended up frustrating subjects who couldn’t "squeeze" their mentation into the 10 categories.

Eventually, when we took up ganzfeld studies again at PRL, we moved back to the older, more global evaluation approaches. Chuck was singularly capable of sensing promising lines of research, but he was equally capable of "letting go" of a particular direction, even if he had invested time and effort in it, when it did not seem to be paying off. He had a strong pragmatic sense of priorities, and was well aware of his responsibilities as research director and as spokesman for the field.

Any new research approach must pass through phases of exploration and of trial and error. Inevitably, problems will be located and will have to be ironed out. There certainly have been a number of methodological improvements in the ganzfeld over the years, which attests to the cumulative nature of scientific parapsychology; but despite some minor weaknesses the approach, from the outset, was quite sound. I think it is a tribute to Honorton that his very first ganzfeld experiment—the Honorton and Harper (1974) study—can still be referred to as "prototypical" of the research paradigm. From those early days of exploration, through the spirited defense of the paradigm’s robustness (Honorton, 1983, 1985), and on to the empirical demonstration of its value in the PRL autoganzfeld studies (Honorton et al., 1990), Charles Honorton has left a permanent trace in the history of the field.      continued...

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