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The Global Consciousness Project

Article in EXPLORE · July 2006

DOI: 10.1016/j.explore.2006.05.012 · Source: PubMed

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Roger Nelson, PhD
The Global Consciousness
Project
Roger Nelson, PhD, founded the Global
Consciousness Project in an effort to
reveal the existence of a noosphere or
global consciousness. Almost 10 years
later, Nelson believes that the data from
the project support the hypothesis that
consciousness is indeed a creative
force in this world and that on some
level we are all connected.
Interview by Bonnie Horrigan Photography by Jim Greipp
oger Nelson, PhD, is the founding direc-
R tor of the Global Consciousness Project
(GCP). Formed in 1997, the GCP is an
international collaboration of over 100
researchers who share the common mission to
collect continuous data of a kind that might
reveal the existence of a noosphere, or global
consciousness. (The project, which is supported
by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, is explained in
depth at: http://noosphere.princeton.edu.)
From 1980 to 2002, Nelson was the coordi-
nator of research at the Princeton Engineering
Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory at Prince-
ton University in Princeton, New Jersey. The
main focus of his research, both with the PEAR
Lab at Princeton and continuing with the GCP,
has been to develop ways to study conscious-
ness and intention. The experiments at PEAR
EXPLORE: What is the Global Con-
sciousness Project?
ROGER NELSON: The Global Con-
sciousness Project is an effort to capture
some faint indications of a true global con-
sciousness. The purpose of the project is to
examine subtle correlations that appear to
reflect the presence and activity of con-
sciousness in the world. To do this, we use
random event generators (REGs). The
REGs’ normal function is to create ran-
dom sequences, and their intended pur-
pose in the experimental realm is to
register deviations from randomness if
consciousness affects the system.
A global network of REGs record data
and report it via the Internet to central
computers. The heart of the system is the
server named “noosphere,” after Teilhard
© 2006 by Elsevier Inc. Printed in the
United States. All Rights Reserved ISSN 1550-8307/06/$32.00
VOICES
looked at anomalous information transfer (re-
mote perception) and anomalous interactions
of mind and machine, using sensitive physical
systems such as electronic random event gen-
erators. More recently, Nelson extended his
experimental laboratory research to real-world
situations, examining ways to measure the
effects of group consciousness and related
applications such as nonlocal healing.
Prior to 1997, Nelson was a tenured professor at
Johnston State College in Vermont where he taught
experimental psychology, alternate psychologies,
applied psychology, cognitive psychology, and sta-
tistics. He received his PhD in experimental psy-
chology from New York University in 1972.
EXPLORE interviewed Roger Nelson at his
home in Princeton, New Jersey, in February of
2006.
de Chardin’s idea of a global intelligence.
All the data are gathered, processed, and
archived on this server at Princeton.
The REGs, which we call “eggs,” are
placed all over the world. There are about 65
now, all generating continuous random se-
quences. All else being equal, these REGs
should produce a swath of random num-
bers, like a tapestry with no pattern, unroll-
ing in time. We look for patterns in this un-
rolling swath of random numbers that might
correspond to big events in the world, events
that bring all of us together in an awareness
of the same thing such as a response to a
tragedy or great celebration. We look for
events in which people stop being individu-
als and become part of a larger whole be-
cause it is this kind of event that seems to
have a direct effect on the data.
EXPLORE July/August 2006, Vol. 2, No. 4 343
doi:10.1016/j.explore.2006.05.012

At the time of this EXPLORE interview, Roger had just recently returned from an extended trip
to India. He became interested in yoga as a high school student and has been involved in a
variety of meditative practices since that time.
EXPLORE: Have you found evidence for
the direct effect of consciousness on reality?
NELSON: Yes, but by no means always.
The formal hypothesis of the original
event-based experiment is very broad. It
posits that engaging global events will cor-
relate with deviations in the data. But
sometimes when we think there is an event
of some importance, the data won’t show
any sign at all. Yet, for the majority of the
times, it does.
This is how it works. We ask a question
in a scientific way, making a prediction or
a set of hypotheses ahead of time, before
344 EXPLORE July/August 2006, Vol. 2, No. 4
anybody knows what the data look like.
We specify the period of time in which
we’ll look for a deviation in the numbers
that is more than should happen by
chance. Over the seven years we have been
working on this project, the accumulated
evidence suggests that the probability for
something happening in random numbers
that isn’t suppose to happen is one in a
million. In other words, the amount of
deviation we find is pretty good evidence
that we are looking at a real phenomenon.
EXPLORE: Does the data change before,
during, or after the actual event?
NELSON: One of the most spectacular
cases was the terrorist attack on September
11, 2001. The data started changing about
4:30 or 5:00 AM EST. I think the first
plane hit around 8:45 AM. So several
hours before what should have been the
precipitating event, we started seeing pow-
erful changes in the data.
They are many potential explanations.
There were 100 people—the terrorists and
their bosses—maybe more, who knew what
was coming. And the 20 or so people who
were committing themselves to die were
probably saying their prayers at that time.
I think that’s one possibility. My preferred
explanation—and this is a purely specula-
tive, nobody can prove it one way or the
other—is that this hypothetical global con-
sciousness has, just like people have, pre-
monitions. Just as people seem to see
what’s coming in precognitive dreams,
this global consciousness might recognize
the future before it actually arrives.
EXPLORE: My own experience would
support that.
NELSON: Yes, a lot of people believe in
premonitions because they have personal
experience. So maybe that’s what is hap-
pening in this case as well.
A more convincing case, though, is
based on seeing this in other cases, for
example in data corresponding to earth-
quakes with a Richter magnitude of six
and greater. It turns out that, if those
earthquakes are on land that is populated
and, therefore, there is damage and loss of
life, then a very strong and amazing pat-
tern begins about five hours before the
earthquake. So a few hours before an
earthquake like the one that caused the
tsunami or the one that caused the deaths
of 20,000 people in Iran, a distinct pattern
shows up. It’s a V-shaped pattern focused
around the quake. The data beginning 24
hours earlier look like a random walk, but
a few hours before the quake it drops
sharply down to a minimum right during
the main temblor of the earthquake and
then comes back up again. We found this
pattern looking at 92 earthquakes of the
sort that I described— on land and at least a
six on the Richter scale. But, if the earth-
quake is out in the middle of the ocean,
then nothing happens. There is no pattern
in the data from the REGs.
EXPLORE: That’s also interesting.
NELSON: Yes, and in a number of ways.
First is that the patterns exist at all. Second
Voices

Shown here in his home office in Princeton, New Jersey, Roger Nelson spent 22 years as the
Coordinator of Research at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory at
Princeton University.
is that it happens only with earthquakes
that are important to people. This means
that it is consciousness related.
EXPLORE: You have 65 REGs around
the world. Are more concentrated in one
country than another? And, if so, does
that make a difference?
NELSON: That’s actually one of our re-
search questions. First, the answer to your
basic question is yes; we do have far more
in the United States and Europe than in
other parts of the world. It is almost ex-
actly parallel to the infrastructure for the
Internet. The outlying nodes or host sites
Voices
send the information in by way of the In-
ternet. There is almost no connectivity in
most of Africa. We have a couple of sites
in South Africa, and we did have one in
Nairobi, but that person disappeared. The
Internet is also very weak in much of
China and South America and the interior
of Russia.
To answer the second part of your ques-
tion, we are working on finding out
whether it matters. Thus far, how far away
some of the devices are from what’s appar-
ently the stimulating cause doesn’t appear
to make very much difference. Eggs all
EXPLORE July/August 2006, Vol. 2, No. 4 345
over the world will respond, for example,
to something like the terrorist attacks in
New York. But it isn’t simple. There are
small trends suggesting a diminishing ef-
fect with distance, and this means we have
more work to do to answer that question.
EXPLORE: You mentioned that the data
you gather are random numbers. Is it ones
and twos, or is it one through nine?
NELSON: Actually, what we do is collect
200 bits every second from each egg. It’s
like flipping 200 coins and counting the
heads. So you get a number like a 100 plus
or minus a certain normal amount of vari-
ation, which means that numbers regis-
tered in the file every second of every hour
of every month of every year at each of the
sites will be numbers like 103, 92, 107, and
120 once in a while, but mostly in the
range of 85 to 115.
EXPLORE: So in the case of September
11, the numbers went from 100 to 150?
NELSON: The changes we see are much
smaller than that. The average expected
number is 100. Because we have a tremen-
dous amount of data, even a tiny devia-
tion from 100 that is persistent can be sta-
tistically significant. If I have a million
trials with a miniscule but consistent dif-
ference, it will be statistically significant,
which is another way of saying that it is
real. We also look at how the numbers are
distributed. Normally distributed num-
bers are in a bell curve, and that curve not
only has its middle, which might shift, but
it also has a width, or variance, that might
change.
Remember when I mentioned that the
data started changing radically at 4:30 AM
on September 11? That was in the vari-
ance. The distribution started getting ex-
tremely spread out and extremely active
early in the morning. Another way of put-
ting this is that the devices started produc-
ing, on average, much bigger or much
smaller numbers. We were getting more
deviant numbers than would be expected
from REGs. They persisted in doing that
for about six or seven hours. Until about
11 AM EST, about the time that both tow-
ers had collapsed, the Washington attack
was over, and the plane had crashed in
Pennsylvania. When all of that was over,
the variance diminished and stayed re-
duced in a persistent way for several hours.
So, if you draw a picture, you get a moun-
tain in the middle of that day, which is a
uniquely huge deviation in the database.
EXPLORE: Have you ever found huge
deviations but no event?
NELSON: Indeed, we can and do look at
that sort of thing. It is essential to get what
you might think of as a background distri-
bution of spikes or deviations in the data.
That’s the background against which events
that are significantly different tend to stand
out. But the answer to your question is a
little more complicated. If we were to locate
a big deviation in the data without specify-
ing a corresponding event, and then start
looking for an event, we could always find
one. The world is very big and complicated,
and there will be something.
So our process has to be the other way
around. We first make a hypothesis that
says we expect the data to change because
of an event we do know about.
EXPLORE: Tell me about the structure of
the project.
NELSON: We have a collaboration of a
little over 100 people all around the world.
Twenty or so are involved at a level beyond
being a host for the egg devices. They are the
team who built the software and the analyt-
ical tools that are the heart of the system.
Everything feeds into a computer at
Princeton, to a server called “noosphere.”
Noosphere is actually Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin’s term. Just as the biosphere is
composed of all the organisms on Earth
and their interactions, Teilhard postulated
a noosphere composed of all the interact-
ing minds on Earth. The word refers to a
transhuman consciousness emerging from
these interactions that will act as a guiding
intelligence for the Earth.
There are a lot of influences that lead up
to doing something like I am doing, and,
for me, Teilhard de Chardin was one of
the main sources. He was a scientist, pale-
ontologist, and Jesuit priest, who wrote in
the 1940s and 50s about what he thought
of as the future of man. One of his books,
The Phenomenon of Man, contains a beauti-
ful description of evolution, starting with
particles that coalesced to become atoms
and then molecules and eventually com-
plicated molecules. These became life
building blocks from which smaller and
then larger animals emerged and eventu-
ally you have us, self-aware animals. He
said that, while it has been quite a run, it’s
not over, and that there is at least one
more stage. He suggested that we are the
material for the Earth, in its evolution, to
346 EXPLORE July/August 2006, Vol. 2, No. 4
grow a new organ of consciousness, some-
thing analogous to the evolution of the
cerebral cortex in humans.
I think we would do well to think about
the possibility that we are evolving and
that it is possible for us to engage in con-
scious evolution and decide proactively
what the future will be. People do this on
an individual level, but I think we could
do it as cultures and societies and eventu-
ally create a world that will not only sur-
vive but also be a nicer place in which to
live. As it is, we are rather unconscious
about such things.
So inherent in the implications of the
Global Consciousness Project is that con-
sciousness is creative and powerful. We
have the capacity to change the way the
world is, even if it’s in a small way. But if
you engage in small changes, they eventu-
ally scale up into something barely imag-
inable.
EXPLORE: I am going to ask you a ques-
tion that probably everyone asks you—
how does consciousness change the flip-
ping of the coin?
NELSON: Yes, you are right. A lot of peo-
ple ask that, and my usual answer is I don’t
know.
EXPLORE: I knew you were going to say
that.
NELSON: But I have some ideas. It’s
probably easiest to start by what we think
it isn’t. And we think it isn’t something
like energy such as heat or electricity that
comes shooting out of your brain and in-
vades the REG and changes the flow of
electrons. We have very good reason to
believe it can’t be that because we do cer-
tain things to our devices to make sure
they aren’t affected by electromagnetic
fields or other physical biases.
I think the best description is that con-
sciousness is the source of an information
field, which is almost the same thing as
saying a field of patterns or a field of struc-
ture. This field of information is virtual. It
isn’t something you can touch. It’s some-
thing you can know about and appreciate,
but you can’t pick it up and move it from
one place to another. You can’t stick an
instrument into it to measure how strong
it is either—at least, not an ordinary instru-
ment. But for a machine like an REG,
whose future is unknown, it might be pos-
sible. In other words, the REG is moving
along in time and generating these heads
and tails, and there is no possible way of
knowing whether the next bit will be a
head or a tail. So its future is, so to speak,
up for grabs. Now, suppose this device
could absorb information. My informa-
tion. I want it to be a head. Maybe that’s
enough. The sequence of bits is essentially
defined as a sequence of information bits,
so, in principle, we speak the same lan-
guage. The idea, the thought, the intent,
or even the emotional state I am in, these
things are all information and can be de-
scribed as a field of patterning or structure.
That language is the same one spoken by
or listened to by the REG, so maybe that’s
how it works, how consciousness might
change the randomness.
The American physicist David Bohm
wrote about what he called active informa-
tion. He said that active information is vir-
tual; it doesn’t exist in the world unless there
is a need for the information. It’s a bit like
electricity, which can be stored or inactive
until there is a circuit through which it can
flow. Bohm described active information as
part of the implicate order. He said that, be-
hind everything that we know and see, there
is something that we cannot touch or see or
know about—the implicate order. For vari-
ous reasons, including random fluctuations,
things emerge from the implicate order and
become explicate, and that is our world. So
the explicate order arises out of the implicate
order.
For our purposes, what’s intriguing is the
idea that, if there is a need for it, if there is a
place for the implicate to be present in our
manifest world, then the implicit or virtual
information becomes actualized.
Some physicists would say, “I can’t do
anything with that.” But for me, it’s a start.
It’s a metaphorical way of thinking about
how our intentions or our emotional state
could possibly affect REGs. So we are the
pattern sources, the information sources,
and this labile, changeable REG device sit-
ting out there in the world in a sense
“needs” information.
A better metaphor, closer to home for
most of us, might be distant healing. How
does that work? Personally, one of the
most pleasing explanations is that the
healee, the person who is wounded or dis-
eased, is disordered relative to a state that
is normal for human beings. A “well” hu-
man being is beautifully ordered— body
and mind, everything works together in a
magnificent composition of shifting pat-
terns. But when a person gets hurt or
Voices
wounded, they get disordered, and there is
a need for structure. The healer, who may
be far away, has very strong and clear no-
tions about the order that’s needed. So the
healer is a source of virtual or active infor-
mation—it is everywhere all the time— of
the sort that is needed by the healee, and
there is a natural connection between the
two: healer and healee.
Since the healee needs it and can absorb
it and become structured, this is almost an
analog for what we see in the REGs. They
are disordered—that’s what random
means. There is no order at all. So they are
perfectly set to absorb information if some
is available. And some is available.
In the GCP, we set up this big matrix of
real-time random data and ask a question:
will the data change when planes crash
into the towers and kill three thousand
people? We think it is possible. A tremen-
dous amount of information was blasted
into the universe on 9/11, and our REG
network was ready to absorb information
that had to do with consciousness reacting
and creating its future.
EXPLORE: You conducted other re-
search in anomalies at Princeton. Is that
correct?
NELSON: Yes, although I am now retired
from Princeton, I worked there from 1980
to 2002 in the Princeton Engineering
Anomalies Research (PEAR) Lab with Bob
Jahn, Brenda Dunne, York Dobyns, and
several other people. We conducted two
kinds of experiments. One used REGs in
experiments where a person sat by a table
with the REG and tried to change the way
it behaved. We used the same kind of tri-
als—sums of 200 bits. But the effort was
intentional, which is a very different thing.
So a person would sit there and wish for or
intend to get numbers over 100 or num-
bers under 100. And they succeeded. Not
all the people all the time but enough so
that we eventually had a robust database
that is persuasive if you are willing to ac-
cept that such a thing can be studied and
open enough to examine the data.
Then we branched out and conducted a
variety of experiments on different kinds
of machines. All of them had some ran-
dom component. One of my favorites is
what we informally called the pinball ma-
chine. It’s ten feet high and six feet wide
and has 9,000 plastic marbles that are
three-quarters of an inch in diameter. The
marbles come out of a funnel at the top
Voices
and bounce around in pegs, and people
try to get them to move to the left or the
right into collecting bins. And again, they
succeeded in doing so to a statistically sig-
nificant degree.
We had fountains and pendulums and a
little robot that rolled around on a table
while a person tried to get it to move in
their direction, all of which were con-
trolled by random sources. Twenty some
years of work show that there is a persis-
tent miniscule effect of human conscious-
ness or intention in changing the ways
these devices work.
One of the beautiful things for me is
that I have been able to be involved from
the beginning. When you first think of
what kind of questions you want to ask,
how you implement those questions, how
you take the data, how is it analyzed, and
how you interpret it, all of these things are
in my direct experience, so I can have a
great deal of confidence in the results.
EXPLORE: What is the best process for
intentionally changing left to right or one
to two? Because I assume that people
would do it in different ways.
NELSON: You are right. The best process
is one that is suited to the person. We
never tried to give instructions about how
to do it. We only gave instructions about
what the task was. We said, “Here’s what
we want you to do, and we will talk to you
after you are done and see what you have
to report. Maybe you will have learned
something that you can teach us about
how it works.”
We also tried and succeeded in encour-
aging people to come back and do it again
and again. Many people had an opportu-
nity to try different approaches.
EXPLORE: Did they get better with prac-
tice?
NELSON: Not really. Somebody would
get better in a noticeable way, but, almost
always, we could identify that with a
change in attitude, such as coming to ac-
cept that it was possible instead of being
skeptical.
EXPLORE: So the belief that it could
work changed performance?
NELSON: Yes, that’s one of the things.
Another, and I remember this well be-
cause it was so striking, was this person
who tried very hard and came back many
times, and was persistent and careful and
desired to do it and all of that, but she
never had any success. Finally, she said,
EXPLORE July/August 2006, Vol. 2, No. 4 347
“It’s not working anyway, so I think I will
read a magazine.” Well, you know what
happened—she got exactly what she was
trying to get that time. The numbers went
high. And then she proceeded to do as
many experiments as she had done before,
except now, in this completely relaxed let-
it-be mode, she got strong results.
“Inherent in the
implications of the
Global Consciousness
Project is that
consciousness is
creative and
powerful.”
We have two different ways of assigning
intention. One is that you pick it yourself.
Do you want it to be high now or low? Or
the intention could be randomly assigned.
Now you must do a high; now you must
do a low. Another interesting case in-
volved a person who had tremendous suc-
cess on the trials where she chose and ex-
actly the opposite when she was assigned
an intention. Except not only was she not
successful in those circumstances, but the
data went the wrong direction. She got low
numbers when she wanted high if the in-
tention was assigned randomly. So we
thought, aha! Now, we have a personality
detection device identifying someone
who hates being told what to do! But she
said rather than resistance, it was just a
matter of feeling more confident when she
was able to choose herself what to do.
So there has been a tremendous amount
of subtle insight into the esoteric aspects
of consciousness. What happens at the
edges of what’s possible or what’s expected
of human consciousness trying to touch
the world? Ordinarily, we believe in cre-
ativity and the manifestation of con-
sciousness that produces changes in the
world, but we normally think of it as
hands and fingers and muscles and toes.
This effect of intention is something di-
rect. It’s like intentional healing. This is
consciousness reaching out into the world
to change the way things are ever so
slightly, which ultimately builds a pretty
strong case for the creative capacity and
for a power that we didn’t know we have.
EXPLORE: I have to ask this question.
How would you define consciousness?
NELSON: And my answer is that con-
sciousness is that which allows you to ask
the question. But more seriously, con-
sciousness, like most important words,
needs subscripts and superscripts to iden-
tify which consciousness you are talking
about and when. In his book, Science and
Sanity, Polish Count Alfred Korzybski
talks about living in the abstract world ver-
sus the real world. He’s the source of the
notion that words such as consciousness
and love ought to have subscripts. Love1,
love2, love17—there are so many different
meanings for an important word. Korzyb-
ski also said that the word is not the thing,
and the map is not the world.
So all I can give you is an operational
definition of consciousness, which liter-
ally means defining it by the operations
that you perform in the experiment in or-
der to be sure that you are doing what you
intend. In the case of an intentional exper-
iment, the goal is to get numbers that are
larger than 100 in a high trial and numbers
under 100 in a low trial. So the definition
of consciousness for that trial is conscious
intent. But we know that whatever is hap-
pening may also be unconscious or sub-
conscious; it may still be with you while
you sleep or while you are meditating.
Here is an example. I was in Rhinebeck,
New York, at a retreat at Omega being
given by Thich Nhat Hanh. I had arranged
with the people in the lab to do a series of
remote REG experiments. I was sitting
with 600 people in this tent, and sometime
during his talk I thought about my remote
trials and decided the order in which the
high and low and baselines would be. I
wrote it down so that later it could be en-
tered into the database. My results for that
series of experiments were fantastically
good. I had far bigger effects than I have
ever had sitting in the laboratory next to
the machine. And I didn’t think about the
machine at all. I had this brief moment of
thinking high low baseline, and then I
went back to listening to this beautiful talk
by this enlightened monk.
So what’s consciousness? I was busy—my
consciousness was more than just occupied,
it was inundated, almost overwhelmed by
Thich Nhat Hanh. But at the same time,
348 EXPLORE July/August 2006, Vol. 2, No. 4
deep inside were these intentions, and some-
how those conscious intentions penetrated
the miles and time and became good results
in the experiment.
So consciousness is a little of this and a
little of that. And now I know you’re going
to ask, What’s global consciousness?
EXPLORE: Exactly. Please tell us what
you are talking about when you speak of
global consciousness.
NELSON: Again, it’s operationally de-
fined. We say that, beginning at 9 o’clock
and ending at 1 o’clock in the afternoon, is
a period of time that we associate with an
event—a big celebration or a tragic bomb-
ing. Our hypothesis is that the data gath-
ered by the Global Consciousness Project
taken during that time will show a devia-
tion. So that’s an operational definition of
a global consciousness of an event. It’s an
event that brings lots of people to think
about and feel the same thing.
Meanwhile, it’s clear that it’s an unan-
swered question. Whether there is or ever
might be such a thing as global conscious-
ness is unknown. If there were, would it be
some composite of all of us thinking, of all
of us being conscious somehow, or would
it be something quite different such as
earth energies or a composite of the trees
and animals feeling and thinking whatever
they do along with us? There are many
possibilities, but I have favorite models.
“My favorite picture
is that we are all
already participants
in a giant interaction,
which is similar to
the interaction
between all the
neurons in a brain.”
EXPLORE: What are those?
NELSON: It’s what Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin was talking about, that we have
another phase of evolution to grow to-
ward. I can see no reason why we
wouldn’t already be taking the first steps
in that direction. If evolution occurs at
all, there must always be a beginning, an
entering into the next phase. It’s not go-
ing to be instantaneous from one phase
to the next.
So my favorite picture is that we are all
already participants in a giant interaction,
which is similar to the interaction between
all the neurons in a brain. The neurons
don’t know anything about the mind or
the questions or what consciousness is,
but they participate anyway. So I think we
are participating already in something that
is a higher level of consciousness and that,
for all we know, could even be conscious
and self-aware already.
EXPLORE: What is the “so what” of this?
You have spent 20 years gathering data, so
what can you now conclude or do as a
result of this work?
NELSON: That’s one of the most impor-
tant questions of all. The “so what” is that
this work actually does have a chance of
helping some people move in a direction
that I think is important and valuable. I
think it has the potential of showing peo-
ple that consciousness does have a cre-
ative, productive, generative role in the
world and that what we wish for is more
likely to be than if we hadn’t wished for it.
EXPLORE: That’s a nice thought.
NELSON: Yes, it’s very real. We have
good evidence that it is true, and most
people don’t know that. But more impor-
tant, it demonstrates a capability that we
have. It’s subtle, but we do have a capabil-
ity of cooperating and being in a group
and sharing something that manifests in
the world in a subtle way. We have the
capability of changing the future individ-
ually, and, as a group, we have an enor-
mous capability of changing the future.
Now, the next corollary is that we also
have a responsibility. So we have a capa-
bility and a responsibility for changing the
world so that the future is brighter or,
more simply put, we are responsible for
growing up and rescuing ourselves from
our worst tendencies. We can be evolu-
tionary. This is the reason I am interested
in this project.
I have a metaphor for what I am doing.
I think about rain falling on a mountain-
top. A lot of rain falls and creates rivulets,
and they join and become streams. Then
they wind down the mountains and join
to become rivers, and the rivers eventually
get to (and form) the sea. The Global Con-
sciousness project is one rivulet. And what
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Larry Dossey or Barbara Marx Hubbard or
Dean Radin or you are doing, these are
rivulets. The ocean is our future. So that’s
the “so what.”
EXPLORE: Let’s return to Pierre Teil-
hard de Chardin. Evolution is happen-
ing—little molecules become more com-
plex cells and then simple organisms and
then larger organisms. Finally, we arrive
on the scene, and we are “conscious.”
Something is driving this, is it not? It’s
not that all of sudden somebody or
something goes poof, and then we are
conscious. Life was consciousness all
along, wasn’t it? Our bodies were evolv-
ing but so was our consciousness.
NELSON: I subscribe to that. Except
that’s another question like, what is con-
sciousness? I find it very appealing to
think of consciousness as fundamental.
But that’s a very esoteric version of con-
sciousness. It’s not the same thing as the
self-reflection that came into existence
with human beings. Dogs are conscious,
and elephants and mice and apes are
conscious, as we are, but it’s a different
order of consciousness from the sort that
pervades the universe and that is fully
and totally nonlocal. That conscious-
ness is more like the implicate order.
In the Upanishads, the ancients talk
about grand cycles where consciousness
wakes up and then goes to sleep, wakes
up and then goes to sleep. The global
consciousness idea is similar. It is us be-
ing able to look at ourselves in a differ-
ent way that allows us to have insight
into the ride we are taking on the univer-
sal wave of consciousness. So we can ac-
tually become doubly self-reflective.
The truth is, most of the time we are
asleep. But we can wake up a little bit. And
that’s another version of your “so what.”
Knowing that our consciousness is part of
something greater can help us wake up.
EXPLORE: What are the plans for the
future? Are you going to ask some differ-
ent questions?
NELSON: There are two or three aspects
to the future. One idea is to put new soft-
ware into all of the machines so that we
have not one trial per second but maybe
two or three trials per second. The ma-
chinery can do it. So we might have one
trial that’s visible and one that’s seques-
tered such that nobody would look at it
until two or three years down the line. The
idea would be to find out if the seques-
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tered data show the same picture as the
visible data. Nobody knows the answer to
that question.
There is an assumption by most scien-
tific people that they should show the
same pattern because they were taken ad-
jacent to each other in the same moment
on the same kind of machine. But there is
some reason to believe it’s not as simple as
that.
EXPLORE: What is the impetus for ask-
ing that question?
NELSON: It’s a matter of scientific curios-
ity, to find out what happens. Is there a
relationship between the data and physi-
cality? Do two samples from the same ran-
dom source that are directly adjacent to
each other behave the same? If so, that
would mean that there is something more
physical about it than informational.
Knowing this is important for theory and
explanation.
But that’s almost trivial in another con-
text. The real future as far as I am con-
cerned is to use the project to educate peo-
ple. It has some implications. I frequently
talk to religious people, and these groups
are very good audiences. What they are
listening for is something about spiritual-
ity, something about the human being at
the level deeper than mind, deeper than
the material. Many people want encour-
agement, and we have some ammunition
for points of view that are healthier than
those that have been fostered in this coun-
try for much of its history. You know, the
individualist whose primary interest is in
getting “mine first” and to hell with the
rest of you. We can see in the GCP data
that compassion and love have a real and
effective presence in the world. So the
Global Consciousness Project is a vehicle
for encouraging people to believe in and
understand and apply the fact that we are
all connected.
EXPLORE: Did you ever do experiments
with the past? Having people intend to
change data that were already captured?
NELSON: We have a large remote data-
base at PEAR, but most of the time it was
precognitive. People would think about
the change of the instrument or the ma-
chine before it was run and the data were
collected. But some of it was also done
after it was run. Yet it didn’t make any
difference. We were able to show that the
result is unaffected by when the person
did the trial, within the range of a couple
EXPLORE July/August 2006, Vol. 2, No. 4 349
days. So whether you thought about it
right when the machine was running, an
hour before or an hour after, or even a day
or two before or after, the effect somehow
is pretty much the same.
“The Global
Consciousness
Project is a vehicle
for encouraging
people to believe in
and understand and
apply the fact that
we are all
connected.”
Other researchers including Helmut
Schmidt and Dick Bierman have looked at
this more thoroughly. The data show a
small, persistent, and ultimately persua-
sive effect. It doesn’t matter when the con-
scious intent is applied.
EXPLORE: You keep saying small, but
one degree can make the difference be-
tween ice freezing and ice melting.
NELSON: Yes. Many years ago a skeptic
wrote a letter to me in which he said, “You
may have statistical significance, but there
is no practical significance to this; there-
fore, what you are doing makes no sense.”
But the truth is that, if these tiny effects are
real, then the ice melts. Consciousness is
directly connecting and contacting and
changing the world in which it exists. This
is not a trivial thing at all.
EXPLORE: I have one more question.
How did you get from the PEAR experi-
ments to the Global Consciousness
Project?
NELSON: During an interim stage be-
tween the PEAR intentional experiments
and the Global Consciousness Project was
something we called “FieldREG.” What
happened was that we built a version of
the lab experiment machine that ran all
the time. It was just a computer sitting in a
corner that had its own REG device, and it
made data continuously throughout the
day. So we thought, let’s look at what hap-
pens when we have an intense meeting in
the room, where we come in and argue
about something and eventually come to
agreement or blows. What happens? Are
there bumps in the data?
That question produced sufficiently
interesting results that we decided to put
it on a laptop and take it out into the
field. Eventually, we miniaturized it so
we had a FieldREG that fit in a pocket
and could be taken to concerts and foot-
ball games and business meetings and
places like Esalen and various sacred
sites. In general, we found that, when
everybody coalesced and everything
jelled in a “good” meeting or in a pro-
foundly moving ritual, we would get a
deviation in the data. Of course, con-
certs and religious ceremonies are de-
signed to bring people together and take
them out of their individual persona
into a group consciousness. So on aver-
age, if we collect data in a situation that
is conducive to resonant interaction or
cohesiveness of the group, we get
deviation.
I took the FieldREG to Egypt with a
group of 19 spiritual seekers. I knew we
were going to be meditating and chant-
ing in the ancient temples and inside the
great pyramid, and, sure enough, time
after time, the data produced strongly
deviant trends. But, if I was shopping in
the bazaar, the data stayed basically flat.
So the essence is that the sacred place,
the sacred activity, the meshing of a
group in a shared emotionally satisfying
activity creates a group consciousness
that provides information that can be
absorbed by the REG.
It’s an easy conceptual step from that to
spreading the REGs all over the world and
eventually asking the general question: If
there is something that brings us all to-
gether in the same intellectual and emo-
tional framework, so that we are all en-
gaged and forget our own stuff for the
moment and become parts of the larger
whole, will we see evidence of a pattern in
what should be random data?
EXPLORE: So consciousness is creating a
pattern.
NELSON: Yes, patterns where there
should be none. The definition of the ran-
dom device is that there is no pattern.
There is no relationship from one mo-
ment to the next in the data and no pre-
350 EXPLORE July/August 2006, Vol. 2, No. 4
dictability at all for any particular point in
the data. But, with these structuring influ-
ences, it becomes possible to predict that
there will be a pattern, that you will see
more high numbers or more spread out
numbers.
We now have such a strong case that,
even my colleague Peter Bancel, who is an
experimental physicist and a serious skep-
tic, is progressively more impressed that
what we have is real, based on his indepen-
dent analyses. It cannot be hammered out
of existence. It is there.
One piece of that evidence is correla-
tions with earthquakes. We had looked at
some individual earthquakes because they
were great tragedies, global events that oc-
cupied the news. But Peter’s comprehen-
sive survey of all large earthquakes re-
vealed a pattern that is both fantastic and
perfectly reasonable. An earthquake that
kills hundreds or thousands of people is a
big deal in consciousness, and our net-
work responds. Quakes in unpopulated ar-
eas or the middle of the ocean don’t show
up in the data.
EXPLORE: Do you have any correlation
with happy events? Or maybe I should
ask, are there global happy events?
NELSON: One of the first I identified was
New Year’s Eve. From the beginning, we
have been looking at New Year’s Eve be-
cause it definitely draws lots of attention.
But it is a curious thing. It’s not important.
It’s almost completely arbitrary or ab-
stract. I mean, what calendar are you us-
ing? But we’ve studied New Year’s Eve for
the last eight years. And guess what?
There’s a pattern. A spike. It starts five or
ten minutes before and goes to a few min-
utes after. There is a clear, significant re-
sponse, especially in time zones with large
celebrating populations.
There are other kinds of pleasant events.
We have looked at meditation events for
example, and, sure enough, there is some
evidence that our data change when a lot
of people are meditating.
EXPLORE: So the more people involved,
the bigger the effect?
NELSON: We don’t know for sure. I’ve
done some analysis, and the outcomes
show that the effect is larger according to
how many people we believe might be ac-
tually engaged. However, there is a prob-
lem. The number of people might be af-
fected by something else, such as how well
publicized it is. Something like 9/11 had a
huge number of people involved because
it was an event that captured their atten-
tion. In other words, it’s what we call a
confound. You can’t tell which of the two
things it actually is, the number of people
or the importance of the event.
EXPLORE: What about football games?
Do people become one?
NELSON: They actually become two—
each side. We have looked at major sport-
ing events like the World Cup Soccer.
Some of my colleagues thought there
should be a big effect because millions of
people were looking at it. But I already
knew, because we had done some Field-
REG studies, that it wasn’t such a good
bet. But it is important to do the actual
tests, and, sure enough, we analyzed some
big matches, and the results were flat as a
pancake.
Here is my explanation. And this is ac-
tually an important little piece that I
didn’t mention before. The one thing that
I believe is most commonly present in the
events where we see the effect is compas-
sion, or some relative of compassion.
Compassion is something that is practi-
cally definitional in being together with
somebody else. You can’t have compas-
sion unless you are one with the other per-
son in some sense. The cowboy who’s
looking out only for himself does not have
compassion, and, while sporting events
have excitement and shared enthusiasm,
they have nothing that even begins to look
like compassion.
EXPLORE: Tell me a story from your life
that illustrates consciousness and connec-
tion.
NELSON: In the early days of the Global
Consciousness Project, Barry Finn from
New Zealand got in touch with me and
said that he wanted to host an egg. So we
sent eggs to Barry and a friend of his at the
University of Auckland. But then a couple
of years later Barry died from cancer. I had
become friends with him, although we
never met in person, and I decided that I
would be remiss if I didn’t take a look at
the data. The result is one of the most
amazing kinds of records. The data for his
egg and for that of his friend make a
beautiful pattern, starting when they
brought Barry to the hospital for the last
two hours. It makes this beautiful funnel
shape, perfectly symmetrical, with a
sharp inflection exactly when he died. If
you look at the data from his egg over a
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longer period of time, it shows this strik-
ing rise and then goes persistently down
for 24 hours afterwards. It is incredibly
beautiful, and I can’t talk about it with-
out tears.
So in closing, there are four things to
consider in thinking about where these
effects might come from. One of them is
the nominal source, such as the people
who are directly reacting to 9/11, which
you think of immediately. Another one
is the experimenter. In our case, there
Voices
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are 100 people who know about this net-
work, and perhaps they wish the network
would produce something interesting.
Does that change the REG outputs?
That is called an experimenter effect.
The third thing is the nature of the ques-
tion. If you ask one question about an
electron, it’s a particle, but, if you ask a
different question about the same elec-
tron, it’s a wave. And the same thing is
true here. If I ask about variance, I will
probably see something about variance.
EXPLORE July/August 2006, Vol. 2, No. 4 351
But if I ask about correlation among the
eggs, I will see something different. The
fourth determining element is coyote.
The coyote is a pleasing way of talking
about how much we don’t know. How
much work there is to do before we ever
will know anything. So part of it is this
coyote trickster looking at us and laugh-
ing and saying, you know, you shouldn’t
become arrogant about your knowledge.
It’s a complex situation, and you have
more to learn.