Global Meditation, Thailand, April 22 2015
This is an event that was suggested by a correspondent working on a movie in which this could be a demonstration. I explained that single events cannot be reliably interpreted (as a caveat provided on each of our analyris pages explains.) It also is a relatively small, local event. We did nevertheless set this as a global event in the formal series.
For our Global Meditation Day on 22 April, it looks like most of our meditators are going to be in Thailand (about 400,000). We were hoping for a global effect, however,it seems more likely that the effect will be much more pronounced in Thailand.
I wanted to check with you to see if your RNGs would register an effect in Thailand as I don't know where they are located or how close they have to be to measure an effect. I hope you can enlighten me. I also wanted to give you the numbers as you mentioned before that when information is available prior to an event you register it in order to set up the hypothesis for formal analysis.
This meditation is in 3 sessions (times given below) however there will be others meditating during the 0900 - 1700 Indochina time, around the world.
9.30-10.30, 13.30-14.00, 16.30-17.00
You say we need repeated events of a similar kind in order to interpret the data reliably . Does that mean they have to be large scale group meditations?
We will do another event in December, again in Thailand, this time with 1 million people meditating. Does the number of people present make a difference or is it simply the frequency of events? If we do need more similar events, I'm assuming it's possible to glean the data from other global meditation days taking place randomly and we would have to let you know in advance re. times? This may pose a problem with timing as we are looking to complete this experiment by the end of the year. However, this is a crucial part of the film and we need to obtain reliable data..
Specific Hypothesis and Results
The GCP event was set for a period of 8 hours to include all three of the meditation periods, as well as the intervening hours. The result is Chisquare 28696.108 on 28800 df, for p = 0.667 and Z = -0.431.
Interpretation
The following graph is a visual display of the statistical result. It shows the second-by-second accumulation of small deviations of the data from what’s expected. Our prediction is that deviations will tend to be positive, and if this is so, the jagged line will tend to go upward. If the endpoint is positive, this is evidence for the general hypothesis and adds to the bottome line. If the endpoint is outside the smooth curve showing 0.05 probability, the deviation is nominally significant. If the trend of the cumulative deviation is downward, this is evidence against the hypothesis, and is subtracted from the bottom line. For more detail on how to interpret the results, see The Science and related pages, as well as the standard caveat below.
Standard caveat
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every success
might be largely driven by chance, and every null
might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.
