Correlation of global events with reg data: An internet-based, nonlocal anomalies experiment - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Sept, 2001 by Roger Nelson

**********

The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international effort involving researchers from several institutions and countries, designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement. The project builds on excellent experiments conducted over the past 35 years at a number of laboratories, demonstrating that human consciousness interacts with random event generators (REGs), apparently "causing" them to produce nonrandom patterns (Jahn, Dunne, Nelson, Dobyns, & Bradish, 1997; Radin & Nelson, 1987). These experimental results clearly show that a broader examination of this phenomenon is warranted. In recent work, preliminary to the GCP, an array of such REG devices in Europe and the United States recorded nonrandom activity during widely shared experiences of deeply engaging events, for example, the funeral ceremonies for Princess Diana, and the international Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. In the fully developed project, a world -spanning array of labile REG detectors connected to computers and communicating to a central data-collection point via the Internet is designed to document and display any subtle, direct effects of people's collective consciousness reacting to global events. The research hypothesis predicts the appearance of coherence and structure in the globally distributed data collected during major events that engage the world population. Confirmation of this specific hypothesis cannot by itself establish the existence of a communal consciousness, given the complex of potential sources for anomalous effects of consciousness, but it should provoke serious consideration of the possibility that such a broadly conceived global consciousness might exist.

Starting in about 1992, a variant of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) REG experiment was implemented as a continuously running monitor, with indexing to identify times corresponding to events such as the beginning and end of runs in another experiment or the emotional presence of a small group meeting in the room. This led to a "field" version of the experiment using a laptop and battery pack for power, and later to a miniaturized version using a palmtop computer and a micro-REG. These "FieldREG" experiments differed from those in the lab most importantly by not having any assigned intentions to distort the data distributions but instead the purpose of recording deviations associated with special states of group consciousness (Nelson, Bradish, Dobyns, Dunne, & Jahn, 1996; Nelson, Jahn, Dunne, Dobyns, & Bradish, 1998). The field experiments, which began formally in 1993, were immediately interesting and soon were conceptually replicated by Dean Radin (Radin, Rebman, & Cross, 1996) and Dick B ierman (1996), using variations on the theme of identifying events and periods of time with special characteristics that might correlate with anomalous deviations of the REG or RNG data sequence. In an early cooperative effort, Bierman, Nelson, and Radin contributed data to a measurement corresponding to the jury verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial (Radin, 1997). An early prototype for a larger network of REG measurements was conducted for the Gaiamind Meditation, for which a widely publicized invitation was made by the organizers to "participate in this experiment in collective intention and share a moment of meditation and prayer for the healing transformation of the Earth." The meditation was synchronous, with a specific time period set for the local equivalent of 17:30 to 17:35 GMT. A serendipitous meeting at the Esalen Institute with the organizers of the Gaiamind project led me to set up a collaboration to gather data during the event from as many sources as possible, asking friends and colleagues with su itable equipment to run it during the defined period on January 23, 1996 (Nelson, 1997). When Princess Diana was killed in 1997, the widespread, empathetic participation during the funeral ceremonies presented another opportunity to collect data with multiple sources, distributed widely in Europe and the United States. This and related global-scale projects are described in some detail in the Electronic Journal for Anomalous Phenomena, or eJAP (Nelson et al., 1998).

These ad hoc collaborations preceded a conference in late 1997 that brought psychophysiologists and psi researchers together in Freiburg, Germany, to talk about integrating sophisticated physiological measures such as electroencephalography (EEG) into experiments on anomalies associated with consciousness. In a casual conversation during a break, the idea of a "World EEC" using REG devices sprang from the context in a remark by Dean Radin. It captured the essence of a more sophisticated version of the global consciousness measurements that already had yielded striking and potentially important results. Indeed, the technical implementation of the GCP somewhat resembles that of the EEC, a technology used to record manifestations of human consciousness in the form of brain activity measured by electrodes distributed over the surface of the head. Of course the earth is not a head, and yet, the image of a global consciousness, comprising a complex and active layer of interconnected, intelligent creatures, is compe lling. One of our collaborators, Greg Nelson, suggested the name ElectroGaiaGram, or EGG, for the network, and we soon began calling it the EGG project and adopted several associated terms for internal technical communication. The analogy with EEC technology might imply that we intend to measure electrical effects, which we do not, but the name is appealing, not least because "egg," as a metaphor, is among the richest words in the English language. In this article, the acronyms GGP and EGG are used interchangeably.