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Page 100
Chuck Honorton confided to me that he was concerned about the fact that his lab was in the basement of a mental hospital. The mental patients were never used as viewers in his research, but he and his staff always wore white lab coats when at work, to enable the doctors to distinguish the psi researchers from the mental patients. After Chuck would describe the ganzfeld protocol to the next day's subjects, he was known to advise them to ''Take two Ping-Pong balls, and call me in the morning." Regrettably, Chuck died in 1992 at the early age of 46, depriving us of a great and compassionate seeker who devoted his entire career to the field of psychic research. We miss him.
Throughout his career, Honorton made consistent efforts to address the attacks of the skeptics and critics of his work in as positive a way as possible. Many psi researchers view their critics as being not particularly well-intentioned. Therefore, they consider the attention given to dealing with their nonconstructive criticism to be a waste of precious time. Honorton, however, continually modified his experiments to meet skeptics' criticisms.
In 1994, after his death, a fifteen-page paper was published that was coauthored by Honorton with psychologist Dr. Daryl Bem, a professor from Cornell University and a former skeptic. The publication signified a landmark accomplishment in the field of psi research because it appeared in the prestigious Psychological Bulletin. 17 The experiments described in that paper were called "the auto-ganzfeld," because the researcher, sender, and receiver were all isolated from each other, and the researcher was isolated from the selection of the target videotapes, which were chosen and shown to the viewer automatically by a computer.
In these experiments, the receiving person was generally a volunteer from the community. Receivers were seated comfortably in reclining chairs, in a soundproof room, with the Ping-Pong balls over their eyes and white noise fed into their earphones. (They might have appeared to an outsider to be bug-eyed monsters from a science fiction novel of the 1950s.) The receiver's task was to remain awake, and to describe into a tape recorder all the impressions that passed through his or her mind during a thirty-minute session. Meanwhile, an ostensible sender would be looking at a randomly

 
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