about the Halwyn Institute

the Halwyn Institute for Psychical Research was founded in 1931 at Crowmarsh, Oxfordshire, to study perception, attention, and what its charter called “the faculties that have no organ.” for most of its life it was a quiet, well-funded, and almost entirely private body.

the Perception Study Group

from 1971 the Institute's Perception Study Group ran a sequence of studies into latent lexical perception — Project 7. the group's stated aim was modest: to find out why a small, consistent fraction of people can recover a word from text that no one should be able to read. its later aims are not described in the surviving public record.

perceptr (2007)

in 2007 the Institute's remaining trustees relaunched Project 7's test battery as a public website, perceptr, “to find Class III subjects at scale.” the beta was intended to run for six months. it accepted responses until at least 2009, after which the site was left in place but unattended.

dissolution

the Institute was dissolved by order on 14 November 1998. its records were sealed. how a body dissolved in 1998 came to launch a website in 2007 is a question the surviving pages do not answer, and the trustees listed below could not be reached.