The first of the PEAR experiments were meant to answer the question “is it possible that human intention (consciousness) can interact directly with the physical world?” When asking this question, the experimenters were not interested in the regular mechanism that we use to interact with the physical world on a day to day basis. They were driven by a number of smaller studies and various bodies of anecdotal evidence which suggested that the mind could directly interact with physical matter. They wanted to know if some element of the mind could actually affect processes in the physical world.

This section of our web page will outline the background that led to the first PEAR experiments, explain how they worked, and then summarize the lab's findings. The key message to take away from this is that while it did not test for or observe any of the anecdotal phenomena mentioned above, PEAR has demonstrated the ability of consciousness to have a small but very statistically significant impact on the outcome of random physical processes. Using millions of samples of data, the lab was able to find a correlation between what human operators intended to happen, and the outcome of the random event generator.

The effects are not "large," but they are very important. The first studies conducted by the lab seem to suggest that human intention interacts with processes at a quantum level. Later, in an experiment using a large mechanical machine whose ultimate outcomes were determined by a series of probabilistic events, the experiments found that these effects could indeed trickle into the macroscopic world. This is particularly relevant in systems whose state is driven by probabilistic phenomena.

These findings have profound implications for the way we view the world. The results of the PEAR lab have not been able to be explained by any known physical forces, and they appear to have unique characteristics that relate only to those areas of physics that we understand the least. When science is able to catch up with this empirical evidence, the world may find itself with more cogent explanations for phenomena in fields such as psychology, physics, medicine, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience.