Roger D. Nelson
Global Consciousness Project, Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Continuous parallel sequences of random data have been accumulated in the Global Consciousness Project (GCP) for eight years as of August 2006, and we have made formal hypothesis tests regarding potential structure in the data associated with each New Year transition during that time. The GCP maintains a network of about 65 active random event generator (REG) devices around the world, each recording 200-bit trial sums at one per second over months and years, and reporting them over the Internet to a central server. We have made two types of prediction for New Year's, one that the mean score across REGs in the network will depart from expectation, and another that the variance across devices will be reduced near midnight. The GCP data are signal averaged across all time zones, and the period surrounding midnight is assessed for each year. The meanshift measure combined across all eight years shows a substantial decline, but it is not statistically significant. The variance measure has a more impressive outcome: Analyses for individual years show results conforming to the hypothesis in about three fourths of the cases, and for the eight years combined, the shape of the signal averaged cumulative deviation is striking. Permutation analysis shows that the prediction of reduced variance is supported with a p-value of 0.026. While it is prudent to keep alternative explanations in mind, these results are prima facie evidence of a large-scale interaction of human consciousness that can have effects in the physical world, similar to those found in intention-based laboratory mind-machine experiments. The project continues, with a focus on refining hypotheses and assessing a broader range of potential correlates.