Mideast Peace Meditation, Nov 9 2017

Another of our informal explorations results from being asked to look at GCP data by people conducting an experiment on meditation and intention furthering the desire for peace around the world. We have a substantial number of similar events in the GCP database. The results of the exploration are presented below in graphical form.

One of the organizers is Tsipi Raz, who gave some details of the experiment. A local RNG was also running, and its data during the event was analysed by Tsipi and colleagues. Tsipi gave some details and descriptions of the meditation experiment which I have lightly edited:

"The intention experiment was not an event with millions of peoples, so of course didn't touch the hearts of millions like the funeral of Princess Diana, but still- according to Lynne [McTaggart], there were 9000 participating, on the film and Facebook - we announced about the experiment- we had at least 10.000 shares in 3 languages, in so many countries - there were announcements in the local media, in the Israeli TV and also channels broadcast to USA and Europe, in more than one time period and more than one newspaper. More than half a million people reacted to it before the experiment, and many more after, it was a very emotional experiment, for the first time Jews, Israelis, Arabs from the Middle East were willing to speak love and compassion publicly - and it was broadcast in real time all over.

"The focus of intention will be toward the Middle East - this intention will be an integral continuation of the journey we filmed here in Israel an area that needs healing for thousands of years.

"We hope for a cooperation of institutes such as yours: the global consciousness project, the HeartMath Institute and the IONS Institute.

"We think that focused intention of hundreds of thousands and possibly we can reach millions of people, with the backing of the world's leading research institutes in the field, and the exposure simultaneously to broadcast television networks to such a project - that it could affect the reality and this is our aim.

"The intention experiment on November 9 2017, started at 20:35:38 and ended at 20:46:16 - Israel time. Israel is GMT+2. the target was the old city of Jerusalem."

Specific Hypothesis and Results

Typical events for the GCP are several hours long (most often 6 hours) but the following graphs show 2 hours beginning half an hour before the specified meditation time, and secondly, the 11 minute period of the meditation. Both show a modest low-going tendency (which we have seen a number of times when looking at mass meditations) but in neither case is the trend statistically significant. The effects seen in GCP data are always small, and they have to be somehow discovered in a sea of noise (low S/N ratio). If small effects are consistent across replications, they gradually rise out of the noise. For individual events or measurements, we cannot make reliable interpretations.

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 bottom 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.