Discovery Lab Answers

Rick Berger’s contributions to parapsychology fall into three distinct areas: technical engineering, empirical research, and forensic methodology.

1. Designing and Building the Autoganzfeld System

Berger’s most consequential technical contribution was designing and building the first fully automated ganzfeld testing system at the Psychophysical Research Laboratories (PRL) in Princeton ^[3]. The system placed target selection, stimulus delivery, blind judging, and data logging under computer control — eliminating the human-handling steps that skeptics had identified as potential sources of experimenter bias. It introduced computer-accessed videotape, enabling dynamic (film-clip) targets alongside static images. Charles Honorton led the PRL research program as principal investigator; Berger was the systems engineer who implemented the technical architecture. The system and protocol were first described in Berger & Honorton (RIP 1985) ^[3]. The 1990 Journal of Parapsychology paper reporting the autoganzfeld results lists Berger as second author alongside Honorton, Varvoglis, Quant, Derr, Hansen, Schechter, and Ferrari ^[3].

2. Empirical Research — Geophysical Correlates of Psi Effect Sizes

Working with Michael Persinger, Berger conducted a quantitative study examining whether annual geomagnetic activity correlated with effect sizes across ESP experiments published over six decades (1882 onward) ^[2]. The study calculated standardized relative effect sizes across that publication record and tested the relationship against geomagnetic indices — a method that treated the existing experimental literature as a dataset in its own right rather than running new trials. This was an early application of effect-size methodology to the psi literature as a whole.

3. Forensic Audits of Psi Datasets — a Bidirectional Standard

Perhaps Berger’s most methodologically distinctive contribution was establishing what the ESP-Nexus forensic page describes as a bidirectional forensic standard: the principle that scrutiny must be applied symmetrically to datasets that appear too weak and to datasets that appear too strong.

• The Blackmore audit ^[4]: Berger went back to Susan Blackmore’s raw source materials, dissertations, and unpublished reports and found pervasive discrepancies between those materials and her published accounts. His 1989 paper in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research concluded that the inconsistencies were serious enough that no conclusions — for or against psi — could be drawn from her database. Critically, he documented that her published reports invoked methodological flaws selectively, treating them as explanations for positive results but not applying the same lens to null results.

• The Spinelli audit ^[5]: While conducting the Blackmore review, Berger also examined Ernesto Spinelli’s ESP dissertation data, finding results he described as raising serious questions — the data appeared, in the source’s own words, “almost too good to be true.”

• The PRL autoganzfeld target distributions ^[1]: In a later collaboration with Dick Bierman and Richard Broughton, Berger re-examined the randomization properties of the PRL autoganzfeld target sequences — the same system he had built — distinguishing between a random procedure and whether the resulting sequence contained unexpected distributional anomalies. This willingness to audit his own system’s output is a direct expression of the bidirectional standard.

Summary

The thread connecting all three areas is a commitment to source-level scrutiny — building a system rigorous enough to withstand examination, then actually performing that examination. For a fuller profile, see Rick E. Berger and the spoke page on Forensic critique of psi datasets.