From 1979 through 2007 the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program at Princeton University explored the role of consciousness in random physical systems and precognitive remote perception. The results from a broad range of experiments, generated under strictly controlled conditions, provided significant statistical evidence that human intention and subjective resonance could influence the output means of otherwise random processes. These investigations, along with a corresponding selection of proposed theoretical models, have combined to illuminate the fundamental nature of the provocative anomalous phenomena that emerged. Productive pursuit of this topic inescapably involved a spectrum of political, cultural, personal, and interpersonal factors that are normally not encountered in more conventional scientific scholarship, but have both enriched and complicated the enterprise in many ways.

Some of the insights gleaned from the work are objectively specifiable, such as the scale and structural character of the anomalous effects; their relative insensitivity to objective physical correlates, including distance and time; the oscillating sequential patterns of performance they display; the major discrepancies between male and female achievements; and their irregular replicability at all levels of experience. But many others relate to subjective issues, such as the responsiveness of the effects to conscious and unconscious intention and to individual and collective resonance; the relevance of ambience and attitude in their generation; and the importance of intrinsic uncertainty as a source of the anomalies. This blend of empirical features predicates radical excursions of the dedicated models, and hence of the more general scientific paradigms, to allow consciousness and its subjective information processing capacities a proactive role in the establishment of objective reality, with all of the complications of specificity, causality, and reproducibility that entails. The attendant complexities of conceptualization, formulation, and implementation notwithstanding, pragmatic applications of these phenomena in many sectors of public endeavor now can be foreseen.