The belief that thought can influence physical reality was dubbed “psychokinesis” in 1934 by parapsychologist J.B. Rhine, who first studied whether the outcome of falling dice could be influenced by people.
That idea was taken from the individual to the global scale in 1997, when Dean Radin – now chief scientist at The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) – theorised the building of a “world EEG”. He’s currently analysing 23 years of results from the Global Consciousness Project (GCP), for the centre he joined four years later, which he says are one in a trillion against happening by chance.
“We began building an electrogaiagram to trace coherent thought and feeling in the world,” writes GCP director Roger Nelson, of Princeton University, on its website.
It consists of a network of random number generators (RNG), numbering about 70 at one point, scattered as far and wide as The Netherlands, Fiji and Kenya (click here to see the current map). Each one generates the equivalent of 200 coin flips per second, which should by chance produce 100 of each.
The use of RNGs to test individual psychic influence was pioneered by a Boeing scientist, Helmut Schmidt, in the 1960s. The hypothesis tested by the GCP is that periods of intense collective attention or emotion will alter those chance results. “When a great event synchronises the feelings of millions of people, our network of [random-number generators] becomes subtly structured,” says the GCP website.
Each minute, the results are aggregated into this splendid dot to show how coherent they are. Green is good. Red? Bring your tomato plants in – stat!
But even then, the colour can’t be used as an alarm bell for imminent doom. (That’s what social media is best at.) The data has a low signal-to-noise ratio: GCP investigators agree it’s hard to tell whether something that looks positive isn’t by chance, and something that looks like a random pattern isn’t hiding a signal. The world’s a big place with a lot of different things going on.
“In the long run,” says its website, “a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analysis.”
They patiently accumulated information from 500 events (more information here), beginning with the US Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Tanzania in 1998, through Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Australia’s Black Saturday bushfires in 2009, and ending with the Cop21 climate deal in Paris.
And instead of looking for a deviation in the data and scanning the headlines to find an “event” to match, they pick an event and see what the figures show. And when those results are added up, the result is phenomenally unlikely to have happened by chance.
But you’re left asking what this shows, given there doesn’t seem anything predictive that can come out of this. Something seems to be happening, but what? As one critic noted, “Data without a theory is as meaningless as words without a narrative.”
Dean Radin’s current research is investigating whether there is a “force-like, causal influence” on the network, or a passive effect based on the investigator’s precognitive choice of picking an event to measure which will show an effect.
The latter formed part of a critique in 2011 in Journal of Scientific Exploration, which basically argued that there was something psychic going on, but global consciousness wasn’t it.
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