The Global Consciousness Project

The Global Consciousness Project operates under the financial aegis of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and is supported by gifts from Dr. Tony Cohen, Mr. Charles Overby, Mrs. Reinhilde Nelson, and two anonymous donors. I am deeply indebted to Greg Nelson and John Walker for the creative and sophisticated implementation of the primary software for the project, and for counsel and assistance with the technical details; to Dick Bierman, Rick Berger, and Richard Broughton, and to all the Egg-hosts for their patience and commitment to the project.

ABSTRACT: This paper describes a large-scale, ongoing research project to assess whether there is a detectable effect of global consciousness. The paper is comprised of edited pages from the active website of the Global Consciousness Project (GCP) at http://noosphere.princeton.edu.

Our personal experiences and a growing number of good experiments show that consciousness and intention can have subtle but important effects in the world. We know that groups of people sometimes experience a special resonance of feelings and ideas, and some recent scientific evidence indicates that effects of coherent group consciousness can be detected with appropriate instruments. The GCP is an international collaboration of researchers extending this research to global dimensions via the Internet. The project uses technology and methods designed to record and visualize effects of events that may stimulate a world-wide consciousness. Examples include the funeral ceremonies of Princess Diana, the first hour of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, and a few minutes around midnight on any New Years Eve. A prediction that we can make now is that the turn of the Millennium will have a measurable effect in the subtle realms of interconnected human consciousness.

The core of the GCP is a synchronized network of electronic random event generators placed to record data at sites around the world and report it via the Internet to central computers. The technological heart of the system is the central server where all data are gathered, processed, and archived. Sophisticated programs create and maintain a growing database generated continuously at a rate of one trial per second at each node in the network. Analytical software and integrative algorithms are designed to assess the scientific question whether there is any evidence for a "global consciousness" that can affect our instruments. Displays of the data take various forms, including some that show the activity in real-time as nearly as possible. Regularly updated tables of statistical information as well as simple and easily understood graphical summaries of several kinds are available. For example, a graph may show the cumulative deviation of data sequences from their expected values as a composite across all the G CP sites around the world for the past hour or the past day--or during a defined "Global Event."

The Global Consciousness Project is an ongoing, long-term experiment, and although the data that have been analyzed thus far show some support (the associated probability at this writing is about one in a hundred) for the hypothesis that a correlation might be found between global events and the composite output of a network of random event generators, it is too early to draw strong conclusions. The growing database of continuous, parallel random event sequences provides a rich opportunity for assessment of correlations with natural time-series variables, including geomagnetic, meteorological, seasonal, and cosmological measures. The public accessibility of the database ensures that all claims and conclusions can be independently verified, while providing an opportunity for a wide variety of exploratory analyses.

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