History
The original Global Consciousness Project (GCP 1.0) was created in 1997 by Dr. Roger Nelson and a group of volunteer researchers and engineers working in the unexplored areas of physics, psychology and consciousness. The purpose was to detect, quantify and study subtle effects of important aspects of interconnectedness and human consciousness, i.e. the effect attention and emotions have on modulating the physical devices at a global scale. GCP 1.0 created and maintained a globally distributed network of rigorously validated physical devices called random number generators (RNGs), that produce strings of random numbers (ones and zeros), much like high speed electronic coin flippers (heads or tails). During the first few years of the project, the number of sites hosting the RNGs grew to a maximum of about 65, with locations from Alaska to Fiji, on all populated continents and in nearly every time zone.
The hypothesis of GCP 1.0 was that continuous parallel streams of time-synchronized data from the random number generator network would show significant deviations from the expected normal randomness during events that produce a large-scale, widely synchronized, focus of attention and emotional reactions.
As of December 2015, 500 formal events have been analyzed to test this hypothesis. For each formal test, the event was specified and made available for public viewing before any data were examined. The prediction for each event was that the data would depart from random expectation based on a pre-specified statistical measure. A variety of events were assessed in this manner, including New Year’s, celebrations, sudden and shocking events like the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001, natural tragedies such as large earthquakes and tsunamis, and large-scale meditations and religious events. The results showed strong correlations in some cases and virtually none in others between the events and the departure from normal, expected levels of randomness in the network. Overall however, the results across all formal tests show clear, highly statistically significant evidence that something remarkable happens when many people experience a collective emotional response to an event.
The composite statistic for the project after 17 years of data accumulation, graphically presented in the above figure, shows a 7-sigma departure from expectation, indicating a probability on the order of 1 in a trillion that the correlation of the data with global events is merely a chance finding.
In other words, when an event evokes an emotional response in a large number of people at the same time it creates a change in what we call the global consciousness field environment that is measured by changes in the behavior of the global network of RNGs.
The data from GCP 1.0 clearly suggests that focused emotional energy and attention can interact with and affect the physical world and that both positive and negative emotions affect the network. The size or magnitude of the measured effect was shown to be linked to emotional categories. Given the basic premise of interconnection, it is no surprise to observe that events that embody or evoke love and compassion show a greater effect on the global network than any other emotion including fear, anger and anxiety. High levels of love and compassion correspond to stronger effects. Events such as Earth Day, organized global meditations, and major demonstrations for peace that promote “global harmony” tend to show a strong positive effect.
In some major events such as the September 11, 2001 attacks, and larger earthquakes the data deviations began several hours before the onset of the event, suggesting a type of pre-stimulus response similar to what is seen in human heart rhythms and other physiological measures in non-local intuition studies.
about.history