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The original Global Consciousness Project hypothesis – ‘Periods of collective attention or emotion in widely distributed populations will correlate with deviations from expectation in a global network of physical random number generators’

The oracle...

...and the egg?

From Nigeria to India and China to Greece, oracles once existed to provide prophecies and profound wisdom to those who consulted them. While oracles such as the I-Ching and similar devices, such as the tarot cards, are still consulted regularly today they are often treated as interesting entertainment rather than serious information sources.

Today, many of us choose instead to consult the robust body of knowledge provided by modern science. Many scientists would dismiss any belief in the validity of prophecy and if anybody was to seriously suggest that human beings could somehow predict future events they had best come armed with plenty of compelling statistical evidence.

So it may come as a surprise to discover that such a body of evidence has seemingly been steadily accumulating since 1998, courtesy of over sixty random number generators (termed ‘eggs’) plugged into computers all over the world. Originally designed to detect patterns in randomly generated electrical signals that may correlate with certain states of consciousness, the eggs have thrown up an interesting conundrum. Not only have they detected huge global events (such as the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, the Concorde crash in Paris and the recent Chilean earthquake) but in some cases they seem to have even predicted them.

While it is tempting, and vital, to scrutinise the method for sources of error (e.g. bias in event selection and timing) it is worth noting that the project founder, Roger Nelson, has a background in physics and statistics and that, to date, even specialists in statistics have been unable to find a flaw in the method or an explanation for the bizarre results.

So why on Earth are respectable scientists even studying this phenomenon in the first place?

The History of the Project

Famous arch at Princeton University, home of PEAR

A graphic representation of the quantum tunneling process

In 1979, American scientist, Robert Jahn, set up the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab (PEAR) at Princeton University in New Jersey. The purpose was to study whether strong emotions or directed intentions could influence sensitive electronic devices, including random components. A year later, cognitive psychology graduate Roger Nelson joined the project and worked as an experiment co-ordinator. Initial results were intriguing.

One of the key components in the PEAR experiments were random event generators (REGs) and a combination of increasing REG portability and software sophistication enabled the technology to be applied outside of the laboratory with a live random data stream from which trial samples could be continuously taken.

By this time, Nelson and his team had moved away from studying direct intentions in favour of applying their methods to situations where group consciousness was heightened, for example during meditation sessions. Again, results created much excitement. Following collaboration with other interested group, the beginnings of what would become the Global Consciousness Project launched into action in 1997. REGs connected to individual computers were linked over the internet like electrodes on a huge global electroencephalogram. Dubbed an ‘electrogaiagram’ after the topical Earth goddess, Gaia, the REGs became known as EGGs.

The Global Consciousness (or EGG) Project is designed to test for correlations between anomalous electrical activity at the time of significant expected and surprise global events. The project collected its first data in August 1998 and has been running ever since, the number of EGGs increasing to over sixty in the decade that has since passed.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the data, and the one that relates to the title of this post, is that deviations from chance seem to be appearing BEFORE the events in question

How it Works: Inside the EGG

The Global Consciousness Project makes use of three types of random event generator, all of which make use of a process known as ‘quantum tunneling’ (see image above) to produce an output of ‘white noise’. Fluctuations due to temperature changes, electrical fields, etc. are corrected by way of a ‘mask’. The end result is a stream of 1s and 0s which should, and usually do, fit inside what is known in statistics as a ‘binomial distribution’.

To measure this white noise, a sample is taken every second, consisting of the sum of 200 bits of data. Since we would expect an equal number of 1s and 0s to be produced, the mean value to which the measured data is compared is 100.

The events tested are listed on the project website, which includes a useful colour key which shows both whether the data taken varied from the mean and, most importantly, how statistically significant any deviation was.

But what constitutes ‘an event’ and when does measurement of that event begin?

Defining Events

The hypothesis of the Global Consciousness Project focuses on the effects of ‘collective attention or emotion in widely distributed populations’. Therefore, relevant events have to be able to demand attention and to reach a global audience.

The researchers decided to use major global news providers (e.g. the BBC and CNN) as a major source for relevant unexpected events, together with some significant local events and major planned events (e.g. high profile funerals, large-scale meditations, celebrations, etc.).

The timing of the sample taken depends on the nature of the event, bearing in mind it is when the event reaches public consciousness that is important. For example, a planned New Years celebration is likely to have a peak around midnight at each location whereas a natural disaster would be expected to have both an immediate local effect and a delayed effect as the world, region by region, becomes exposed to the news.

Algorithms (basically a set of mathematical instructions) are then applied to the data sample and statistical tests (see below) are used to calculate whether the white noise, the stream of 1s and 0s, produced by the REGs correlate with the expected mean or not.

Probability – What the Numbers Really Mean

In short – everything! In studies of this nature, the conclusions of whether a real effect is being detected or not boils down to the reliability of the statistics involved. For those with more than a basic grasp of statistics, the best source of information will probably be the project’s website itself. Otherwise I’ll do my best to explain.

The type of statistics that experimenters use to test their predictions (or hypotheses) are called ‘inferential statistics’ and in a nutshell they are used to extract meaningful information about causal processes.

There are many different types of tests that are used and scientists choose which ones to use on the basis of the type of data collected and other design factors.

One of the tests employed by the researchers on the Global Consciousness project is called a ‘chi square’ test. This test determines how an expected frequency deviates from an observed frequency and it’s outcome is used to generate a probability value (or p-value).

The p-value is simply the decimal equivalent of how likely the measured result is to have occurred by chance. For example, a p-value of 0.05 tels us that, according to the test employed, there was a 5% chance that this was a lucky hit – or a 95% chance that something actually happened – with me still?

Looking at individual events (click here to visit the official website), you will find different p-values, ranging from very significant deviations from chance to those which are only slightly deviant and a small number which are significant for how little the signal varied from its mean value (e.g. the Haiti earthquake). What has got the project team so excited (and the skeptics so perplexed) is the cumulative deviation from chance. Taken over all of the events, p equals a staggering 0.000000008694 at the time of writing.

It is important to bear in mind that the inferential statistics are in no way conclusive. Other statistical and design factors have to be considered before researchers can have a high degree of confidence that their results are truly significant (as opposed to statistically significant). For example, the amount of data collected and whether that data are independent from one another are often points of contention between statisticians and the project website contains examples of ongoing academic debate over the project’s astounding results.

However, at the time of writing, no statistician has been able to find a fatal flaw in the project design and to put this all in perspective, if the design is sound then the evidence for the hypothesis should be strong enough to warrant serious attention from the mainstream journals.

Some examples

To round off I present three examples of events which seem to have been registered by and sometimes even predicted by the Egg Project. They are taken from the full list of over 300 events recorded by the researchers.

1. 8th August 1998 – The US embassy bombings in Africa
This event was the first formal study of prediction carried out by the project. The time sample selected was the three hour period following the attacks on the embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania. The p-value was 0.00066 which corresponds to a less than 1% chance that the anomalous REG activity occurred by chance. Although this is the most statistically significant single event, Roger Nelson explained to me that this could have been due to the low number of eggs (three) in operation at the time – an example of the care that needs to be taken with statistics.

2. 11th September 2001 – The World Trade Center attacks
Naturally, the shocking and unforgettable impact of the World Trade Center attacks would be expected to register clearly on any measure of global consciousness.

Not surprisingly, a variance was present but the significance value was only 0.028, about 35 to 1 odds against chance. However, this can be explained partly by the conservative definition of the event time which ran from ten minutes before to four hours after the event.

Additional analysis, based on predictions made by Dean Radin, a senior scientist at the Institute for Noetic Sciences, calculated the cumulative deviation from expectation over a longer period of time. Here, results were more outstanding with conservative p-values of 0.0048 (possibly even 0.0009).

Most interesting of all, the initial deviations from normal began at between 4 and 6 am EST, several hours before the first tower was struck.

3. 27th February 2012 – Chilean Earthquake
This, event number 323, is the most recent on file, and it too seems to demonstrate a precognitive awareness that began to affect the data about 6 hours before the earthquake. The site graphs also plot the variation of the local egg in Santiago, comparing it with the overall data, over a 48 hour period. The p-value for this event was 0.138.

Do you have any personal experiences with or opinions on the GCP or related subjects that you would like to share? If so, please leave a comment below.

References
Global Consciousness Project [online],link, last accessed 23rd Mar 2010

Image Attributions
Oracle and quantum tunneling images are in the public domain
Graph images released under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0 image by TinyPebble (link not active at time of posting)
Princeton arch image released under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0 image by GK tramrunner

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