Herb Mertz on the Origins of Princeton's PEAR Lab

Eric opened the session by welcoming listeners to the Psychology of the Future online summit, a series built around practical psychology drawn from people working in self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine. His guest for the conversation was Herb Mertz, president of Psyleron Incorporated. Psyleron is a privately held company that turns the findings of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, usually shortened to PEAR, into commercial products.

For more than thirty years, the PEAR laboratory at Princeton ran what stands as the most thorough and organized study of how the human mind might interact with physical matter. The core of the work involved human intention and whether it could sway the output of random event generators (also called random number generators). Herb had been part of the effort since its earliest days, so Eric asked him to walk through the story for anyone hearing about it for the first time.

Herb started with the name itself, which he admitted is a mouthful. The two words that carry the weight are "engineering anomalies." That phrasing was chosen deliberately as an alternative to language like psychology or psychic studies. What the researchers were after was anomalous activity: events that show up when they statistically should not, physical outcomes that chance alone would not produce. The framing shifts the emphasis away from conventional parapsychology and toward something measurable.

Part of why the label mattered came down to where the work was happening. Princeton is a mainstream institution, not a place associated with research of this kind, so a project like this sat at the edge of what the university normally entertained, to put it gently. Dressing it in engineering terms gave it a footing it might not otherwise have had.

The lab itself grew out of a single request. The dean of the engineering school had a student who wanted to run a research project on mind over matter, the idea that a person's intention could directly affect physical things. That interest landed with a professor named John, and the project took shape from there.

For Herb, the pull was personal. He studied engineering under Professor John at Princeton precisely because he wanted to understand the mind and how it differed from physical matter. The two threads came together, and he was helping out at the lab before it had even formally opened its doors.