Brenda J. Dunne

Dunne's role at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory was the operational one, and the distinction matters when reading the published record. Robert Jahn supplied the institutional cover and the theoretical framing; Dunne, trained as a developmental psychologist at the University of Chicago, designed and supervised the sessions, managed the volunteer operators and maintained the database that the laboratory's claims rested on.

Over twenty-eight years that database grew to many millions of individual binary trials, an archive whose sheer scale is not in dispute even among those who reject every conclusion drawn from it. She co-authored Margins of Reality with Jahn in 1987, the fullest statement of the laboratory's position for a general readership, and a long series of technical reports in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Her particular interest lay less in whether the aggregate deviation was real than in the pattern of individual differences within it, the observation that some operators appeared to produce larger and more consistent shifts than others and that pairs of operators working together sometimes produced different results again. That observation is either the most interesting thing the laboratory found or the clearest sign that its analyses were fitting noise, and which of those it is has never been settled.

The claim that individual operators differed reliably from one another sat at the centre of both PEAR's case and the case against it. If the deviations were a genuine effect of intention, one would expect people to vary in it, as they vary in every other human capacity, and Dunne argued that the observed spread of operator signatures was exactly what a real psychological variable looks like.

Critics, including the analysis prepared for the National Research Council review in 1988, made the opposite reading: an aggregate result carried by a handful of high-scoring participants out of many is the classic appearance of chance variation combined with the freedom to analyse subgroups, and the laboratory's failure to pre-specify which operators and which conditions would be tested made the two possibilities impossible to separate after the fact. Dunne's response, that the effect was too small and too dependent on individual engagement to survive a rigidly prescribed protocol, is the same defence offered across parapsychology and carries the same weakness, since it predicts that better controls will always weaken the result. When Princeton closed the laboratory in 2007 she became president of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories, which continues to publish work in this vein outside a university setting.