Collective consciousness and the inauguration

This is a plot of odds against chance for data from the Global Consciousness Project on the evening before and day of the Obama inauguration. The red arrow points to the moment when the oath of office was being recited. This is an exploratory analysis, so it shouldn't be regarded as persuasive as a preplanned analysis would be. But still, the coincidence in time between what was arguably the single most anticipated moment by hundreds of millions of viewers during the inauguration, and the spike in odds at the same time, is quite striking. Further analyses of this event will eventually be posted at the GCP site.

Comments

gregory said…
the heck with professional skeptics, the newpapers of the world are enough evidence for me ..

i enjoy your work ..

and imagine how it will be looked at in just a few dozen years ..

enjoy, gregory lent
Anonymous said…
It's very interesting data, but it leaves me wondering how hard it would be to get more detailed data.

For example, I suspect it is currently impossible to sift out unexpected events that are shocking to large groups (such as the 9/11 attacks) from highly anticipated events (such as a scheduled inauguration).

Assuming that parapsychology continues to advance, I hope that in 100 years it would be possible to map the collective cringe in global consciousness when a charismatic leader stutters during an important televised utterance. But that kind of detail is probably decades away at least.
AC4O said…
That's really cool. I wonder if there is any data from election night. Thanks for the post.
Dean Radin said…
> I suspect it is currently impossible to sift out unexpected events that are shocking to large groups (such as the 9/11 attacks) from highly anticipated events (such as a scheduled inauguration).

Yes, if we're actually dealing with global mind, then it's an exceedingly complex "signal." See the Global Consciousness Project's website for many more details about the experiment, its capabilities and limitations, etc.

By the way, the Institute of Heartmath has created a new research program in partnership with the GCP, called the Global Coherence Initiative.
Skiba said…
Wow! Thats some spike.
Didn't get anything like this on
my Psyleron REG, just a little "bump" during the inauguration
Dean Radin said…
> just a little "bump" during the inauguration

That's what this is too, except based on lots of data from RNGs located around the world. These individual "signals" are extremely small. Similar to conducting evoked response tests with noisy EEG signals, it can take many hundreds or even thousands of repeated trials to begin to see consistent effects.
DougD said…
Dean,

What if everyone involved with GCP hosted two or more REGs instead of just one? Could that improve the signal-to-noise ratio? Could it result in great correlations among locally-situated REGs?

Doug
Dean Radin said…
The main limitation in this project is funding. The network has been running mostly on a volunteer basis since it started, so doubling the network size is not currently feasible. However, it is possible to study even vs. odd samples from each REG, and that's something we've been looking at. Under the null hypothesis every sample is independent, so alternate samples should produce the same results as two separate REG data streams.
Brian Roemmele said…
Dean, thank you for all the work you do!

The "media" has already called this the most watched event in the history of TV. Has anyone thus far correlated this data to other similar events? Can one say at this point that the spike in non randomness is the largest such spike? How does it compare to other spikes? Any early insights on the similarities and/or differences to other large magnitude events?

Also, how can one host a RNG and or fund other to do so?
Dean Radin said…
> Has anyone thus far correlated this data to other similar events?

Yes, see the GCP website. Over 250 worldwide events have been studied so far. The GCP's page for the inauguration is at

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/obama.inauguration.html

You'll see that the formal analysis did not show a striking outcome. It's important to keep in mind that while my exploratory analysis is intriguing, it is not the standard method that is typically used to analyze events.

By contrast, the entire GCP database does employ a pre-specified, formal method to analyze the data, and it shows a massively strong effect against chance. But it took many repeated events to show this.

> Can one say at this point that the spike in non randomness is the largest such spike? How does it compare to other spikes?

It is not especially huge. E.g., the results around 911 were quite a bit stronger. It's mainly the coincidence in time in this case that is interesting.

> Also, how can one host a RNG and or fund other to do so?

See the GCP site for details: http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
Anonymous said…
"The main limitation in this project is funding. The network has been running mostly on a volunteer basis since it started..."

"Dean, thank you for all the work you do! "

I'll second the "thank you." This field couldn't exist without some very talented folks who put knowledge above personal convenience and profit.

While I would like to say, "Yes, I'll help fund-raise for all these worthy causes," in fact past experience has taught me that I don't have enough endurance to do everything, and the people around me have a limited amount of enthusiasm to tap.

This blog gives me some great leads on research that I might be able to get recruits for, though. For example, the HeartMath research would definitely appeal to the alternative medicine community in my city, and the Disclosure Project would appeal to a somewhat overlapping but largely distinct demographic. I might be able to promote both causes to different groups.
Concrescent said…
Particularly fascinating is the fact that the [McKenna] Timewave graph, projected from the 64 hexagrams of the King Wen sequence of the I-Ching, shows a very large spike over the month of January, 2009. This ingression of Novelty is equal in magnitude to 9/11 or the release of Netscape and sudden explosion of the public internet in 1995, and represents greater dehabituation than anything in the remaining history yet to unfold between now and 12/21/2012.

[IMG]http://i277.photobucket.com/albums/kk71/Press_to_Digitate/TWGraph1.jpg[/IMG]

How the ancient Chinese, 3,500+ years ago knew that a remarkable 'Change Agent' would assume power in the world's most influential nation, in this month, is an astonishing question. It appears likely that the GCP output and the Timewave are more than coincidentally related.

Its not just that the Timewave predicts major events, which people then react to emotionally, diverging the RNGs from Random; rather, both abut up against the fractal nature of Time and the Chaos of Chance.

I submit that on the microscale, it is a testable proposition as to whether or not the I-Ching mechanism may be used to successfully predict EGG behavior.
Dean Radin said…
It's an interesting idea, and one of many ideas that the GCP analysts have considered. The nice thing about this project is that all of the data, all 10 years of it, are freely downloadable by anyone who would like to explore their own hypotheses. This was intentionally designed to be an open, public experiment.


See this YouTube for a news clip on the GCP:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5D-mCxeRno&&fmt=18

And this YouTube channel for a series of clips about the project

http://www.youtube.com/user/GCPvideos
David Bailey said…
Concrescent,

Dean must be particularly tolerant to publish your comment, which seems to be a parody of some new age thinking but not of the GCP.
sbu said…
Can you explain to me what constitutes a correlation in the random generated data, in mathematical terms. This is unclear to after have read about the project at the global consciousness homepage.

Thank you
Dean Radin said…
I thought McKenna's Timewave Zero concept, like much of his lectures and writing, was quite creative. His idea of events in time as a kind of fractal, with intricately repeating moments and cycles throughout history, was inspired by the I Ching.

So I think the question here was whether that kind of predictive pattern might be detectable in the GCP data. I suspect the answer is no, but it is a testable question.
Dean Radin said…
See this page

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/science2.html#hypothesis

and especially the section labeled "Analytical Recipes," for the mathematics. The various "covar" equations there describe the type of cross-RNG correlations that are typically examined.
Unknown said…
Thank you for pointing this out.

Very impressive!
Concrescent said…
Actually, the issue of a relationship between the [I-Ching derived] Timewave and the GCP has nothing to do with 'New Age' philosophy. Its about the fact that both the I-Ching and the RNG/REG purport to be affected by the influence of human consciousness upon outcomes of random chance, through some [presumably quantum] mechanism embedded in the substructure of the physical universe.

If a group of human operators were to elaborate new hexagrams (through traditional coin toss, etc.) in realtime, while in the proximity of a standard EGG, the comparitive deviation from randomness could be statistically compared. If they correlate in in microcosm, then it suddenly becomes more likely that the Timewave is, in fact, graphing events at the macroscale of the type which the GCP is able to register globally.

As to how King Wen developed the primary sequence which is attributed to him (there are others, as by Fu Xi), and why it so correctly anticipates the major events of history - not only until McKenna's death in 2000, but to the present day - is a different mystery. So is the intricate relationship between its 64 hexagrams and the 64 codons of our DNA. Those are not questions we can answer directly.

But when events such as 9/11, the initial explosion of the public internet, wars in the middle east, and, most spectacularly, the events of this very month, vividly reflect themselves in both the Timewave and GCP data, it merits a proper inquiry to explore a relationship between the two.

One outcome might be that physical manifestors of 'randomness' (i.e. mechanical coin toss) might be more readily influenced by human consciousness than solid state electronics. Were that to be the case, an improved GCP 2.0 might be made more sensitive without the RNG/REG component.
sbu said…
If I understand it correctly only the squared deviation from the expected mean for each egg is used in the statistics. This means that the corrolation is calculated from only 60-65 samples even though the underlying samples consists of thousands of bits.

If your hypothesis is true I would expect to see corrolated patterns in the bit sequences too. Is this not getting analyzed?

Also the synchronization between each egg must be insanely accurate for this experiment to make sense.

Thank you
Dean Radin said…
>If your hypothesis is true I would expect to see corrolated patterns in the bit sequences too. Is this not getting analyzed?

Correlations among bits within samples are not examined. Only one-second sample data are stored, mainly because otherwise the amount of data produced would be overwhelming. If this project were well funded collecting all data would not be a problem.

Correlations among samples across RNGs have been examined, and they are not at chance levels during large-scale world events.

> Also the synchronization between each egg must be insanely accurate for this experiment to make sense.

Each egg is independently synchronized to net time, so sample timing is accurate to within a fraction of a second.
sbu said…
Maybe I have misunderstood how samples are generated, but as I understand it, one egg might produce the bit flow 11110000 and another egg 00001111. These samples gives the same deviation from the mean and hence will show a correlation. Is this correctly understood?
Dean Radin said…
> Is this correctly understood?

Given that the samples (the sum of bits) in your example are identical, then yes (assuming of course that in actual analyses we're dealing with many such samples from multiple RNGs).
sbu said…
I'm not questioning that the squared deviation from the mean corrolates during large-scale world events. I just think examining the bit patterns could give interesting information about the underlying mechanism that causes these corrolations. If e.g. two eggs produce approx. the same bit pattern 11110000, 11110000 whenever you got a corrolation then I think you got a more solid argument that the QM process in the RNGs somehow becomes synchronized. If instead you got bit patterns like 11110000, 11000011, 00111100, 10101010 which also corrolates it inevitable becomes more complicated to come up with a theory explaining this, even in paranormal terms. But then again I guess not everything needs to be explained.

It surprises me it's so hard to get funding for alternative research.
Dean Radin said…
> I just think examining the bit patterns could give interesting information about the underlying mechanism that causes these corrolations.

I agree. The interest is certainly there, but the funding to do something about it, not so much.

> It surprises me it's so hard to get funding for alternative research.

Raising funds for anything that challenges the status quo, whether in the arts, science, politics, or business, is always exceptionally difficult. It's part of human nature to be wary of things that are different. And while that inertia is a persistent annoyance to all creative people, an argument can be made that it serves a purpose: It helps maintain stability in society.

As history shows all too often, when that stability is threatened, for any reason, the veneer of a civil society begins to crack. We're witnessing those cracks today with the meltdown of the financial markets.

In addition, many creative ideas don't lead to anything useful. So when funders are faced with deciding whether to promote the boringly predictable vs. the highly creative, they have the difficult task of guessing whether the money will be well spent, and also whether they should promote something that may be too radical for comfort.

Personally, I'm grateful for a very stable society, because without it basic science cannot take place. I'm also grateful for visionary funders who can see beyond the immediate needs of today, and are willing to invest in knowledge for the future.
Krishna Madappa said…
Namaste Dear Dean,
Did a water study with the EPC and posted on "Water Media":
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=45636759481&oid=9768691695
OOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMM to Coherence Awakening in ALL!!!
Krishna
I'm quite surprised at how people are comparing the inagauration to 9/11. These are not comparable events in my opinion.

The entire world knows the U.S. elects a president every four years and stages an inagauration. We're conditioned for more than a year about who that person is likely to be, and on election day we know each of the two people involved have about a 50 percent chance to be the next president. We're bombarded by messages for almost two years about the event. While electing a black man as president is unique in our history, the public was well conditioned for it.

By contrast, 9/11 had no precedent and came as a complete surprise with horiffic consequences. Planes are rarely hijacked in the U.S., have never before been flown into three buildings on the same day and we've never seen three skyscrapers suffer complete loss of structural integrity before. And of course, we never had 3,000 U.S. citizens die in a single day that way before.

I'm sorry, but by comparison, the inagauration was rather tame.
Unknown said…
I've wondered some time if there may have been evolutionary selection for coherence in humans. Does anything in the
GCP results suggest that certain global populations have a greater influence in coherence? Perhaps, single events do not consistently support coherence, in part, because they exclude the attention of some subset of the population , that happen to be the predominate contributors to the 'effect'.


Why is it that the GCP uses 200-bit/s, as opposed to something like the Quantis (16Mbit/s) REG? Funding?

I came across the GCP recently, and I find it fascinating!
Dean Radin said…
Among other firsts, electronic RNGs were first created for parapsychological research. For about four decades psi researchers experimented with various custom-designed RNGs, but by the time the GCP was being designed in 1997 a well-vetted RNG circuit was available -- the Orion. That RNG operated at 9600 baud, and at the time computer memory was not cheap. So the 200 bit/second sample became a convenient standard. Since then newer and faster RNGs have become available.
zadeh79 said…
Considering that such a large number of individuals are required to get a , relatively, small effect, it is difficult to envision how natural selection would have allowed for some 'coherence' bio-mechanism. What may be equally as strange as the effect itself, is the possibility that human minds, are inherently (without the aid of selection) causal to it.

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