"The mind's extended reach remains to be fully defined in scientific terms, but research on human consciousness suggests that we may have direct communication links with each other, and that our intentions can have effects in the world despite physical barriers and separations. We are compelled by good evidence to accept correlations that we cannot yet explain. It appears that consciousness may sometimes produce something that resembles, at least metaphorically, a nonlocal field of meaningful information."
[1]
The Global Consciousness Project takes this possibility as a starting point for a speculation that such fields generated by individual consciousness would interact and combine, and ultimately have a global presence.
Usually, because we are busy with individual lives, there is little to produce structure in the field, so it is random and not detectable. But occasionally there are global-scale events that bring great numbers of us to a common focus and an unusual coherence of thought and feeling.
To study the effects of a possible global consciousness, we have created a world-spanning network of devices sensitive to coherence and resonance in the mental domain. Continuous streams of data are sent over the internet to be archived and correlated with events that may evoke a world-wide consciousness.
Examples that appear to have done so include both peaceful gatherings and disasters: a few minutes around midnight on any New Years Eve, the first hour of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, the Papal visit to Israel, a variety of global meditations, several major earthquakes, and September 11 2001. [1]
Methods
The Global Consciousness Project utilizes random event generators (REGs) in an effort to tap a postulated human consciousness field that may encircle the Earth. The REGs have been operating in the background, all around the world, for seven years running.
This project is a multidisciplinary collaboration among approximately 100 scientists, engineers, artists and others, to study the effects of consciousness and how it interacts with physical systems.
REGs use computer technology to generate ones and zeros in random sequences. The numbers are printed on a graph. The laws of chance dictate that equal numbers of ones and zeros should be churned out, represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation would show as a curve or a spike.
History
During the late 70s, Prof Jahn carried out tests to determine whether the power of human thoughts could impact on the output of an REG. Test subjects were asked to direct their minds on the machine.
The results were astonishing. Ordinary people, using their thoughts or intention, could influence the REG. It responded by spitting out unequal numbers of ones or zeros, producing significant fluctuations on the graph.
Dr Nelson enlarged on Prof Jahn's work by taking the machines to group meditations. Once again, dramatic shifts were seen in the patterns of numbers.
Dr Nelson connected 40 REGs to his laboratory computer in Princeton. On September 6, 1997, the graph catapulted upwards; his machines reported a huge deviation from the norm. That day, an estimated one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, at Westminster Abbey.
In 1998, Dr Nelson gathered together scientists from all corners of the globe to analyze the phenomenon. Subsequently, the Global Consciousness Project was born.
Predicting Future Events
Certain events even appear to have been predicted by the generators! Preceding 9/11, a bizarre spike of non-random activity was noted 4 hours before the attacks on the Twin Towers. [2]
In the last weeks of December 2004 the various "black boxes" again went crazy, showing dramatic peaks while everything seemed peaceful and calm. Just 24 hours later, an earthquake deep beneath the Indian Ocean triggered the tsunami which devastated South-East Asia, and claimed the lives of an estimated quarter of a million people.[3]
Conclusions
The results suggest that mind and matter are linked in some fashion-that human consciousness can indeed influence, with resultant non-random fluctuations in streams of truly random data.
If this is true, it would explain psychic ability. If consciousness can be tapped into and also transmitted, then precognitive ability and telepathy, remote viewing and remote influencing become believable and tenable. [2]
"My own "model" is that consciousness or mind is the source or seat of a nonlocal, active information field. This is not a standard, well defined physical construct, but as an operational metaphor it helps to form useful questions for the empirical research. Such fields interact, usually with random phase relationship and no detectable product. When some or many consciousness (information) fields are driven in common, or for whatever reason become coherent and resonant, they interact in phase, and create a new, highly structured information field. The randon event generator has an informational aspect (entropy) and a completely undetermined future, and I speculate, following Bohm, that it manifests a "need for information" which allows or guides the actualization of the active information sourced in human, group, or global consciousness." - Roger Nelson, the founding director of the Global Consciousness Project.
See also -
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/terror.html
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/126649/can_this_black_box_see_into_the_future/
