Occasional GCP Updates |
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This page is the repository for the occasional updates I have been sending to the GCP mailing list every two or three months over the past several years. I've decided to make the actual note sent via email very short, just an announcement and a link to the current update. This puts a smaller load on the web, and on everybody's mail queue. As time becomes available, I will add archived issues. GCP/EGG Update July 15 2008As befits the long hiatus, there is a very long list of things that might be noted, but I will just hit some high points. One is meetings with remarkable people (for Gurdjieff fans this will be recognizable) or just plain meetings. In March we went to the Bial Symposium in Porto, Portugal, and it was excellent. Half the participants were mainstream psychophysiologists at the top of their game, the other half were my remarkable colleagues in the business of consciousness research at the edges, people like Dick Bierman, Etzel Cardena, Dean Radin, Stephan Schmidt, Caroline Watt, and others you may recognize as leaders in psi research. A big, interested audience, and respectful exchanges. I think the GCP talk aroused the most critical comments, but it probably is the most "out" material encountered in contexts that definitely are scientific. Equally delightful was the more recent meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration, which is always at the head of the class for academic gatherings. This year's meeting was exceptionally good, with several topics that deeply interest me, and some really rmarkable presentations. I would recommend anyone interested in the frontier sciences check out the SSE, and join the organization, which justifies the support of its members. It is designed to be a forum for serious research in topic areas that don't get a hearing in the normal sciences -- parapsychology, ufo research, alternative medicine and healing, cryptozoology, and so on. Smart people, with actual open minds, able to listen carefully even if skeptical, and to ask honest, helpful questions that help make the science better. We took a few extra days after the SSE, which was in Boulder, Colorado, to explore the Rocky Mountains, and to visit old friends in Breckenridge, on the western slopes. Beautiful territory, which always makes me think humans cannot destroy everthing after all -- these mountains are magnificently massive. On the other hand, so are the oceans, and we are far along a destructive path that is changing them profoundly, killing the corals and sharks, overfishing everywhere, and of course poisoning ourselves with heavy metals and hormones in every seafood bite. Back to a more joyous outlook, the price of oil is finally waking more of us to a realism that has been missing in our perceptions of the planet. So the upset over high prices and the dangers of mal-distributed wealth are pushing us closer to a conscious recognition of the nature of our shared planetary home. As Buckminster Fuller so clearly understood, there is enough, more than enough for all. We only need to organize what we have (and in the process, of course, organize ourselves). That still is far in the future, but I wonder if this pressure to organize, to perceive more clearly our interconnected nature might underly the subtle but deeply meaningful findings of the Global Consciousness Project. We can see our capabilities and responsibilities more clearly in the bright light of necessity, and that light is coming up -- as we speak. And back to the listing of what's been happening, just a few examples. The paper by Bancel and Nelson, mentioned in the last update, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. It will be a couple of months still, but if you want a preview, let me know. This is a foundation and background for a series of papers detailing the first 10 years of the project. The project started collecting data at the beginning of August, 1998, and while we won't be doing any grand celebration, we have a couple of anniversary items in mind. We have begun the process of rebuilding the GCP website to have an up-to-date presence and more fluid navigation. We will have a professional redesign and in the process will also work to simplify some of the main descriptive pages and make them more readable. This will cost a bit, so if you or people you know would like to contribute, please check out the donations page. Ummm -- the list: The deep analysis continues to yield interesting results, some surprising, others confirmatory, all informative. Let me make a real list of examples.
The list is longer, but enough for now. The most important summary statement is that we are beginning to see progress toward models that have two important qualities. Good models help shape the questions and analyses that lead to deeper understanding. Ultimately they are precursors to theoretical descriptions which not only clarify and explain how the effects are produces, but help bring other thoughtful observers to look carefully at this work. We need more hands and eyes to develop an understanding and descry the implications of these suggestive data. I hope you are all well, and ready for the next days and years. These are momentous times. The change to come soon in the American presidency may be the beginning of a richer and more generous political movement. (Take a look at the data for Obama's nomination.) We need great leaders in these times. It is always important, but with so much in flux, so many challenges, this era seems especially to require of all of us the best we can be, and with inspirational leaders in business and government (and indeed in our news and entertainment) we will move more surely toward our potential as humans.
GCP/EGG Update Mar 17 2008I've been thinking about an update, and did not realize how long it's been -- nearly three months. "Time flies when you're having fun" goes the saying, so it must be that I am having fun. On with the job! Beyond the holiday season, it has been a busy time, with a fair amount of work in my other occupations, helping the Society for Scientific Exploration in a couple of committees -- including public relations; and as the President of the Parapsychological Association, with many attendant missions also including publicity. I recommend both of these organizations to anyone with more than a passing interest in science at the edges of what we know. Join one or both of them, even if you don't think you are likely to participate or go to meetings etc. Your presence in the membership adds weight and vitality, and because these organizations treat "controversial" topics and are consequently small, they benefit greatly from your support. I may have mentioned this before, but the meetings are my favorites among academic gatherings, and I am not alone. Peter Bancel and I have just finished a very nice paper documenting the basics and the primary findings of the GCP/EGG project. It is in the review process now, and will, we think, be published in a few months in Journal of Scientific Exploration (the SSE journal). If you would like to see a preprint, write to me. This paper is the foundation for a series of others looking at deeper analyses, and some very interesting findings. Among the basic discoveries are some that are only possible because the data are generated in a globally dispersed network. For example, the primary effect, which is significant with million to one odds, is driven by correlations among the random devices. In other words, it is the interaction or relationship over distances up to thousands of kilometers that counts. Does that sound a little like the interactions of human thought and emotion we have sought to capture? Speaking of emotion, my wife and I are off to Portugal in a few days, to attend the 7th annual Bial Conference in Porto. The theme is "Beyond and Behind the Brain: Emotions". I will give a talk on the appearance of emotions in our operationally defined Global Consciousness. It is quite striking to see the clarity of effects from emotions, and perhaps more important, to see how very similar the relationships are to ordinary human emotional reactions. The big effects are in the presence of love and fear. And factors like the level or power of the emotions do just what we expect from personal experiences. I'm looking forward to the meeting, which will include several old friends, and, I suspect, some new ones. And then Lefty and I will take a few days to enjoy Portugal, one of those places which maintain an old-fashioned human scale and a relaxed emphasis on good food and friendly relations. Occasionally I get a suggestion to look at a "Ted Talk" and sometimes they are phenomenal. Here are two, one by a neuroscientist talking about experiencing a stroke from the inside, and ultimately about the "enlightenment" she comes to by having the busy half of her consciousness turned off for a time. This is 20 minutes long, but quite something. Jill Bolte Taylor. The second is a brilliant short talk by Robert Thurman who is the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Monk by the Dalai Lama. He is a scholar, author and tireless proponent of peace. What is most penetrating in Thurman's talk is his recipe for happiness (he uses different terms), which amounts to being connected to others, to accepting the consequences of allowing yourself to be compassionate. It is a way to become whole, and to become richer by giving some part of your self to others.
GCP/EGG Update Dec 23 2007In my cover note I sent wishes for the holiday season and a healthy, peaceful New Year. I also mentioned a quest for a short, strong expression of a thought that seems to be a necessary understanding, and to present an important question: What can we do about the fact that throughout history it is our leaders who have caused trouble, have made war, and who have thus created the misery that too often characterizes the lives or causes the deaths of so many people? Leaders want war. People don't. (Most will realize this is an exaggerated form of "Some leaders choose war to serve their needs, while most people don't benefit and don't want war.") Is this so? Well, usually, yes. We can find exceptions I am sure, like simple migratory invasion of a settled territory by people from elsewhere, looking for survival sustenance. But even in such an example close examinations finds leadership that instead of cooperative intent chooses violent cooptation of land and resources -- and, not insignificantly, control and power. As Teilhard de Chardin put it: The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth. Albert Einstein put the same understanding in different words: A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences his thoughts and feeling as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. In the GCP/EGG project it is fair to say that the convergent evidence for something we like to call Global Consciousness continues to gather. Personally, I have had to give up a part of my skepticism. (It may surprise many readers that I am skeptical, but that is the way I was raised, and all my formal education was typical in reinforcing a "show me" attitude.) The independent pieces of evidence generated by my colleagues, notably Peter Bancel and William Treurniet, look at the data from different perspectives from mine, and they all dovetail. That is, we see statistically significant effects in answer to very different questions, and in all cases, there should be no effects because the data are designed to be random. Moreover, the context for these effects is what one can think of as "control" data which are indeed random as expected. Some recent work has focused on separating the 250 formal events into categories, updating and extending similar work in 2004. Beyond the assignment to subsets such as War, Celebration, Sports, Politics, etc., we have been looking at a more sharply defined set of categories, attempting to collect those events that evoke or contain basic emotions like Fear, Love, Grief, or Anger. Of course assignment decisions have to be largely subjective, but they can be made with sufficient reliability to be instructive, and quite interesting. The upshot is that we find some strong differences that suggest the "global consciousness" we are attempting to detect responds in ways quite similar to individual humans. The strongest and most reliable GCP/EGG responses are to powerful emotions of fear and love or compassion. Events with low emotional intensity don't produce much effect. Both positive and negative events have strong influences, but if the events are neutral, non-emotional, we don't see trends in the data. I have made a small slide show of the emotion results in PDF form. This is work in progress, not to be further distributed, please. For now, let me wish you all the best for this holiday season, and for all of us peace and good health in the coming New Year. I expect 2008 to be eventful, and for many more of our leaders to take positive steps toward wise and creative stewardship of the earth. GCP/EGG Update Nov 18 2007The past few months have been something like a whirlwind of travel, conferences, meetings, interviews ... I am looking forward to some "downtime" with a slower pace and meditative moments. The metaphors of the seasons really seem especially appropriate this year. It is time for a Winter season in my schedule, and in some respects, it actually is necessary. For example, in the last two weeks, while catching up from a month on the road, and preparing for presentations and workshops that I'll be doing next week, I have also been working to bring the Egg network back up to its full size. Eggs stop running for various reasons, and it is part of my job to keep track, and to help the hosts bring their eggs back online. Most of the time that's easy, but there are some cases that require troubleshooting and dealing with new issues (like increasingly agressive firewalls that don't know about our unique communication protocols.) Anyhow, the upshot is that the total number of Eggs in the network has fallen under 60, and I'm hoping we'll soon recover or replace the lost Eggs. The good news is that our world is a beautiful place, and it is a delight and a privilege to be able to experience the geography and the people out there. Travel gives perspective on who we are, and enriches our possibilities by stretching our conceptions. There are lots of serious problems in the world that mostly come down to seeing others where we could see brothers. Quite by accident I came across an insightful speech by an Irish foundation official to colleagues in Washington, DC, about perceptions of the US abroad. I think it is worth a read. We have several new events in the Results table, and the bottom line probablility for a chance explanation of the formal tests of our general hypothesis is now less than 1 in a million. Some of the recent events are samples from what seems to be a growing number and richness of broadly organized meditations and vigils for peace and a heathy future (e.g., the Global OM on Sept 15, and the International Day of Peace on Sept 21). Others are sharply focused. The Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies for Al Gore and the UN Panel on Climate Change are associated with a heartening data trend. There are great tragedies too, in our complex world. The effects of the category IV cyclone Sidr that smashed and flooded the coast of Bangladesh seem to have been noted by the Egg network, which displays steady data trends over many hours. There are also new results in the comprehensive analyses that are mostly the work of Peter Bancel. These can be seen through links on the analytical extensions page. One of the most astonishing of these is the long-term trend examination and the apparent correlation with polling results. The results in this analysis continue to get stronger, and stimulate inclinations to attribute real-world meaning to the GCP results. The most recent update of this analysis shows two surprising things. 1) The long, downward trend in the data that began in late 2001 still continues, and it is highly significant. 2) The apparent correlation of the long term trend with a social measure, presidential approval ratings from 1095 separate polls over the past 9 years. I am tempted to predict an inflection in the trend about one year from now, and a return to normal expectation (a level cumulative deviation trace). If we are really lucky and begin to recognize and accept our fundamental interconnection and interdependence, I think the trend will reverse and turn positive. This expectation is not mine alone, as you all know. For example, Positive Future Consulting has promising and provocative messages for those who look forward. I looked around there, and found much to appreciate, including Three Prayers for Humanity. One of my favorite holidays is Thanksgiving, which will be in a few days, on Thursday the 22nd of November in the US. I think this holiday is increasingly celebrated in other countries, often with a different date, but with the same meaning. It commemorates a feast held in 1621 by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, and now as in 1621 it is to give thanks for the things one has at the end of the harvest season. It is almost unique in retaining a non-commercial character, and bringing people together to share the blessings nature bestows. Thank you for your presence among those blessings. Roger GCP/EGG Update Sept 14 2007Sometimes I am tempted to write about political and propaganda matters in these update notes. But since I want the notes to reflect the science and art of the GCP, I can't do much of that despite the deep feelings of sadness and frustration we probably all share about the difficulties we face making a healthy world. As usual, there are interesting new bits and pieces. For example, I have developed the Conclusions page somewhat further, and it now has an extensive list of clear and well-supported findings, as well as a shorter list of recent analyses. One of the most intriguing of these is evidence that consciousness has a very general presence in the data. A spike of correlation between measures for an exact 24-hour cycle, but not for longer or shorter "days" reflects a persistent, general effect of human consciousness. Earlier versions of this question failed to find any evidence, but the present analysis is more sophisticated and it builds on other work indicating an optimum time-period for reactions to global events. There appears to be a "moment" for global consciousness on the order of 1 or 2 hours, analogous to a "moment" in human consciousness of something like 100 milliseconds. Several new formal events have been added (e.g., the "Fire the Grid" event, and the Minneapolis bridge collapse and the Peruvian earthquake). And some recent exploratory events may be of interest, including the release of Deathly Hallows and more recently, the safe landing of NASA's teacher in space, Barbara Morgan. The former are linked to the Results table, and the latter to recent items in the list of Informal analyses. A moment of social/political rumination: How can we actually affect the way things develop on the earth, our only home? One of the implications I see from the GCP work is encouragement to believe what we think and feel and wish for actually has a presence in the world. In other words, that holding an intention for things to change can help them do so -- albeit with such subtlety it is difficult to see. On the other hand, many of the changes I wish for, and imagine you do too, are an uphill challenge because there are strong forces and influences that would rather maintain our societal structures and emphases as they are. I am thinking of, for example, the political system in the US. It is not working as we naively think it should; it no longer seems to be, as Lincoln so elegantly put it, "of the people, for the people, and by the people". So -- I am wishing for a change toward that old-fashioned expression of what a democracy should be. Good luck! I had written more in this vein when I started this update note a couple of weeks ago, but the examples were of the "cup half empty" variety. Instead of those, here are some positive notes: Flying to Denver on a trip to visit my brother in Nebraska last year, I sat next to Julie Speer Hunniford, who is the Executive Director of Little Voice, a non-profit making documentaries to raise awareness of social issues and inspire positive social change. The "coincidental" seating allowed us to discover the remarkable fit of Julie's interests and mine, so this year, Lefty and I stopped in to visit, and to talk about a film Little Voice is planning on "Connections" like those we document in the GCP/EGG data. Check out their website, and look for a fit to your interests and mission. Some time ago I think I recommended Ode, a wonderful magazine for optimistic social observers. The current issue has an interview article with the Dalai Lama saying, "War is old-fashioned". In Denver we discovered another one, with a similar perspective in a fresh and very young mode. Elephant is published in Colorado, I think in Boulder, but I suspect it will soon be (inter)national. The subtitle is "It's about the mindful life" and it can be found at organic food stores, yoga schools, etc., or at their website. In an interview in the current issue, Bill McKibben says,
I agree with that -- it is good news, and will be better when we "individually" recognize how powerful we are when we engage with each other and become a community. We are connected, and that's beautiful. It appears (if you squint) that we are changing, and that trust in our interdependence is growing. It may be too subtle to see, but the evidence is good that it's real. My best to you all, Roger
GCP/EGG Update July 7 2007The deeper analysis of our data yields surprises, and sometimes even require me to re-examine the notions I have built up over a quarter century of research at the edges of what we know about consciousness. A case in point is Peter Bancel's probe into subtle indications that there may be a kind of "recovery" phase in addition to the original effect on the data associated with major events. At first glance this looks like there must be some strange tendency for nature to remember the deviations from randomness and compensate for them. But such an accounting is not in the nature of mother nature, or more specifically in the nature of randomness. But it is does require explanation. The most likely candidate is differences in the state and the effects of "global consciousness" over the time course of a major event. Watch this space for further developments. MoveOn, the political action organization is helping to promote a giant rally for a solution to the climate crisis this Saturday, 7/7/07. They envision two billion people around the world gathering at concerts on seven continents and at over 6,000 parties from Alabama to Zimbabwe. Al Gore is a major mover, and while it is hard to imagine 2 billion actually paying attention, it will be interesting to see how the GCP network responds. You can find more information at avaaz.org or moveon.org. The SSE meeting in early June was fine. Lots of interesting papers and people. The invited speakers included Barbara Marx Hubbard, with whom I had really interesting connections. We agreed to engourage everyone we know to work toward creating a Planetary Smile. Nice image, and entirely possible over the next few years -- maybe in time for the famous Mayan calendar year, 2012. I made a slide show of GCP materials for the poster session, and will make that available on request. The Southwest is a draw. In addition to the Seed Dialogue in Albuquerque mentioned in the last Update, I will be going to the Sedona Creative Life Center in November. Canada is on the list too this year, with the Meeting of Minds mid-July in Vancouver, and the Parapsychology Association annual meeting in Halifax in early August. In October we will be in Europe, but no professional meetings (just relatives and friends and interesting places). Then in November, I will make a presentation on the "science of intention" to doctors interested in alternative perspectives at a meeting in St. Maartens. The results table has some interesting new items. The grand scale meditations organized by Common Passion during the last half of May had striking outcomes, especially on the focal day of May 20 (see event #241 for details). World Tai Chi and Chigong day, though much smaller, also had interesting trends. But political activities continue to be of minor interest to the network, even when, as happened to Rudy Giuliani, lightning strikes nearby. Shelley Yates, the driver behind the Fire the Grid event, is very persuasive. Whether we believe the fine details of her account, or her interpretaions of her experience, her argument is powerful. We can remake the world, and create something fine. I am not sure she says it this way, but to me it is clear that there are so many of us who want a healthier, more compassionate world that we have the power to accomplish that. In the PEAR lab we had a tiny poster on the wall that said, "If we all work together we can subvert the system." True then, true now, always true. Be well, everyone, Roger
GCP/EGG Update April 22 2007I'm listening to Shubhra Guha singing Raga Chhayanat with accompaniment by harmonium and tabla. It is beautiful. The world is filled with such beauty, which blooms when there is peace. I have added some new links to the "political" and "application" pages of the GCP website. For example, there is access to a website called Global Citizens for Peace. While the Global Consciousness Project focuses mainly on doing the science well, it seems appropriate also to think about the implications of our work, which by now provides remarkably clear indications of human interconnections that are subtle but important. In any case, it seems most important to push strongly and persistently toward peace because peace is the necessary condition for creativity. It is an obvious underlying assumption in a no-holds-barred assessment of leadership by Lee Iacocca. The annual meeting of the SSE 2007, which I've mentioned before, is shaping up to be interesting. There will be a whole day given to consciousness related research and theory. We'll have a presentation by Peter Bancel, whose sophisticated analyses have produced a deep understanding of the GCP data. He will preview a comprehensive paper on the evidence for "structure where there should be none" coming from several independent statistics. Sounds dry, but in terms of implications, the current state of the evidence is, to me, mind-boggling. Though it may not be obvious, I am a skeptic, meaning that I'm willing to consider unlikely things only if there is really excellent evidence for them. I like multiple perspectives, and independent confirming research. That's the sort of thing Peter has been developing, and it is looking good. There are several additions to the formal event analysis sequence, and the composite result now has odds against chance of about a million to one. The average effect size is equivalent to a Z-score of about 0.3, and since we like to think of a Z-score of about 1.6 as "significant", this means that we can't expect individual events to show significance. Instead, we have to patiently collect 30 or 40 likely cases to have reliable statistics. Despite this it is interesting to look at individual cases and we may be able to learn something from them. You can see descriptions and graphical displays linked from the results page. You may also have interest in new explorations added to the list of informal analyses. There's also an interesting change in the egghosts page. I received an email from Fernando Lucas Rodriguez, suggesting we use a google map to show where the eggs are. And he had done all the hard work of translating my table into the needed format. The resulting Egghosts Map is pretty cool. Travel season begins this week. I'll be at conferences in various places over the next months, including a talk at the Rhine Research Center in Durham on 27 April, a conference on Imagination, Consciousness and the New Science in New York May 18-20, the Society for Scientific Exploration meeting in East Lansing May 30-Jun 2, the Parapsychology Association meeting in Halifax Aug 2-5, and shortly thereafter a Seed Dialogue in Albuquerque. Let me know if you would like more information about any of these. I wish you all well. Spring is happening in my northern hemisphere location, and blooming flowers make it look like all is well with the world. I continue to see us as filled with potential like flower buds waiting to bloom. We just need a Spring season in the world of human thought and action. Roger GCP/EGG Update February 28 2007Here is a irony that I noted in a recent news item. Japan continues to hunt whales, despite wide opposition. But their primary processing ship caught fire during the hunt near New Zealand, and this season's hunt may have to be abandoned. I hope they and all other whale hunting nations will grow wiser. http://email.globeandmail.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/h4b40IJt4G0BHt0E4Jr0Ac I have started a new page on the GCP website. It is called "Applications" and will be for ideas about doing something in the world to help us move toward the potential indicated in the interconnections we see in the data. For example, one morning I woke up with the question how to understand torture, so as to do something about it. This is no new question, and it is one that, personally, I don't want to think about. But it comes unbidden, and it begs for an answer because until we learn how to cure that disease, we can't replace war with peace. Yes there are other problems, such as marketplace greed, but first things first. Another new item on the website is a little change in the materials related to funding. The "Donations" link and the "Participation" button both lead to a page with some brief descriptions of things we would like to do and how much money is required. The GCP remains a project that runs mainly on energy and time freely given by very generous (remarkable) people. But there are always a number of very good ideas waiting for support, and I will be working more directly to find it. Your ideas, suggestions, and help are welcome. New results have been flowing in from Peter Bancel's analyses. Among them are the clear establishment of correlations between eggs as the major source of the effects we see. This means that the eggs act more like each other than they should during the global events we identify. We also have evidence for a functional relationship of effects with the distance separating egg pairs. Results like these are powerful, objective, and independent confirmations that there is real structure in the data. Many of you will think, well, what's new? Isn't it clear already? But we are looking at subtle things, and working at the edge of understanding, and multiple perspectives provide converging evidence of the structure, and more important, they become building blocks for models and eventually, for understanding how this strange, unexpected, and wonderful effect of human consciousness is made. We know that the signal to noise ratio is so small that individual events won't reliably create significant effects in our analysis. But occasionally things stand out in a surprisingly persuasive way. You're familiar with the 9/11 case, and some others. A couple of recent cases you might like to look at are the TM meditation gathering over many weeks in the summer and fall, and the Burning Man event that has been going on for years. Both show enormous deviations, and both cases are composites of multiple instances. For details and illustrations, follow these URLs: http://noosphere.princeton.edu/tm.resonance.html http://noosphere.princeton.edu/burning.man.8.html I can recommend Dean Radin's new book, "Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality". Dean is one of the original team who helped create the GCP/EGG project. He is also famously prolific, and has an amazing array of research projects and experience. You can read up on it in his book, but also his take on how things (might) work. Along the way, he gives an intelligent and intelligible short course in modern physics, and entanglement -- which works well as a description for the interconnection implied by the GCP data. We have some new eggs -- in Quepos, Costa Rica hosted by James Lindelien, in Beijing, by Peter Sallade, one just now running in Buenos Aires, hosted by Kristen Neiling, and one in Novosibirsk, by Ivan Avdeyev that we hope soon will be online. Let me remind you again about the SSE and the 26th annual meeting, in East Lansing, Michigan, May 31 - June 2. See http://www.scientificexploration.org/ for more details. The meeting is shaping up to be very interesting. Come if you can. The SSE provides a forum for science and research that otherwise tends to be excluded. Check it out, and join if you want to support this open minded perspective. Days ago, when I first started composing this update, I made some notes. One was "No new wars". Not sure what inspired it, but I am glad to hear that the US, Iran, and Syria will join other neighbors of Iraq for talks. No guarantee that this spells the end of violence there, but each journey begins with a single step. Standing last Wednesday with Quakers in a silent prayer for peace, I considered what peace could mean. A great gift of resources would be made free to power creativity and a flowering of social goods. What a good idea. Best wishes to you all, Roger GCP/EGG Update December 4 2006The time passes so quickly. I think it may be more than two months since my last update, and you may wonder what has happened. All is well, and the remarkable network of volunteers contributing time and energy continue their commitment. Occasionally someone asks how long I expect to keep the GCP running. Perhaps a good goal is 2012, the famous Mayan calendar date. One thing I've been busy with is the Society for Scientific Exploration. It's a favorite organization, and I'm the program chairman for the SSE 2007 Annual Meeting. You all are invited. The SSE meetings are open to the public, and are an opportunity to see science at its tolerant best, examining the growing edge of what we know about the world. If you are not a member of SSE, please consider joining. Associate membership is open to everyone who is interested in our mission, namely, to provide a forum for scientific work that flows outside the main stream. There's more info on the meeting at: http://noosphere.global-mind.org/SSE2007/26th.php.html Several upcoming articles and programs present aspects of the GCP. A TV movie, "The Science of Peace" that is now filming, includes us. Another movie, called "The Joy of Sox", started with the psychic communion of (Boston Red Sox) baseball fans and players and quickly grew to look broadly at consciousness fields, coherence, and resonance. http://www.thejoyofsoxmovie.com/ A new magazine called "Make" (from O'Reilly Media) has a feature on the GCP/EGG project in an upcoming issue. I'll put it on the GCP Media Information page when available. "Make" is at http://www.makezine.com/. I've also been fielding questions and requests for interviews concerning the "Globalorgasm" project, which is promoting a unique coming together of love and peace. They said we (the GCP) were participating in an event on December 22 involving as many people as possible having an orgasm while thinking of peace. I put a gentle disclaimer on the GCP site, and asked them to correct their site, but I think it is a delightful, creative notion. http://www.globalorgasm.org The data continue to show about the same level of subtle correlations, while Peter Bancel's analyses are gathering the threads into a coherent picture. We are working on papers detailing this revealing overview. We were unsuccessful in a Bial grant application to help, but the work goes on thanks to the generosity of individuals. A couple of recent events in the formal series are noteworthy: We decided to assess the "Super Radiance Yogic Flying" program organized by the Transcentental Meditation organization in August and September as a formal event and found a -2.5 sigma effect. The result is consistent with the claim that mass meditations produce a "calming" effect on the environment. Not so strong (but a pleasant surprise to me) was the 1.3 sigma effect for the US election results. Maybe more evidence for an experimenter effect? I admit delight that there will be a shift toward balance in the US congress. High recommendations for "Bobby" the movie. See it to understand how close we come, sometimes, to the compassion and love that is our destined path to full humanity. There is beauty in the movie. It shows leadership of a kind we long to see again. The movie includes original footage and powerful excerpts from speeches. Here's a sample:
Make gentle the life of this world. This is the holiday season, and I send my best wishes for gentle sharing with family and friends. Love goes far. Roger GCP/EGG Update September 8 2001Five years ago I wrote something optimistic about how quiet it was in the world -- then Sept 11 happened. One's optimism takes a hit now and then, but it is still the best attitude I can come up with. Before I go on -- or rather, before you go on, please be sure to let me know if you don't want to be on this mailing list for occasional GCP/EGG updates. Lots of recent travel. To San Diego for the AAAS symposium on time reversal or retrocausation. To England for visits to ancient monuments, and to Sweden for the Parapsychological Association annual meeting. In San Diego, I presented a paper, co-authored with Peter Bancel, on recent earthquake analyses showing an anomalous precursor response. See http://noosphere.global-mind.org/papers/pdf/GCP.AAAS.06.pdf. In Stockholm I presented a paper summarizing the eight New Year celebrations the GCP has monitored. Available at http://noosphere.global-mind.org/papers/pdf/GCP.PA.06.pdf. In England, Lefty and I traveled with a group interested in crop circles, but we also visited Avebury and Stonehenge. Avebury is a remarkable place, one of the largest and oldest of the stone circles. I was there collecting Field REG data, and also participated in a large meditation event that was coordinated and synchronized with groups around the world. In two visits to the part of Avebury prepared for the event, the REG data showed significant deviations, and GCP data collected during the same time showed a non-significant positive trend. A brief report is linked from the results table at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/results.html. It is event number 220. I must say that although I do have a science-oriented attitude, the real measure of this ancient center is in a more personal response: I loved it there. The GCP has decided to go ahead with an idea that has been discussed for a long time, namely to collect at least two, and maybe as many as five trials per second instead of one. This will allow some new analytical work that bears on mechanism, and also gives an opportunity to keep some data sequestered for comparitive analysis 6 months or a year later, enabling a new level of testing for reliability and assessment of a special class of theoretical models. This work will depend on a successful proposal for new funding, so your positive regard is most welcome. A few days ago I finally saw "An Inconvenient Truth", the film of Al Gore's campaign to persuade as many as possible of us to recognize the environmental situation. It is, as Lefty put it, not a movie, but a "Predigt" German for sermon. This is a compliment, not a complaint, for it is clear that we need to be lectured to, and sermonized, and plied with every available persuasive means. Al Gore is really impressive, clear as a bell. He's pushing us to take an active part in shaping a more positive future. One of my favorite organizations is the SSE, which I recommend you consider joining to help support the only general forum for scientific topics that stretch the boundaries of what is accepted as science. The website is www.scientificexploration.org. It fosters creative, out-of-the box thinking. For example, a few days ago I received a description of the "Life Force Summit", which is the work of SSE members. The summit will bring together people who intend to do something practical and direct about making a positive future. The website is www.life-force-summit.com. The list of groups working with such intent could be long, but we are most of us already linked into organizations and possiblities that give us a place to put our energies. A consolidation giving meta-access to life-affirming efforts of this kind called the "Hitchiker's Guide to Awakening" is under construction at www.universal-awakening.org. Be well, and as you have extra time and energy, give it to the future. Best, Roger GCP/EGG Update July 4 2006It is just a chance thing that I decide to write an update note on the Fourth of July, the independence day holiday for the USA. Well, perhaps not just chance. It has been a while, and events conspire to give the impetus just now. And I'll admit that the symbolic note inspires me because the USA is my country and it seems this day is witness to deeper problems than we have seen over most of its history. Like most people, I love the ideas enshrined in our declaration of independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." People around the world have admired the principles of the American revolution, but they, along with a large proportion of Americans are concerned with what appears to be an erosion of those principles justified by a war on terror that is itself terrifying in many ways. I pray that our principles will be brought to the fore again, and soon. The GCP is eight years old now, and still running strong. The bottom line statistic for the series of formal tests of the hypothesis of correlation with global events has a probability of a few parts in a million. Beyond this, we have, thanks to Peter Bancel and William Treurniet, and others, some new perspectives that go beyond the basic analysis. Peter and I have been working on earthquakes, which appear to produce an effect on the GCP network beginning about 8 hours before the quake -- but only if the quakes occur in areas where people are affected, not in the oceans. A powerpoint of my presentation to the AAAS in June is at http://noosphere.global-mind.org/papers/ppt/AAAS2006.pres.ppt A published version with much more detail will be ready soon. My next travel is to Avebury and Stonehenge with a group of people planning a "Great Meditation" in which people all around the world are invited to join. The time will be July 22nd, 2006 at 11:00pm British Summer Time, with preparations beginning an hour earlier. I plan to collect FieldREG data at this event and others over a few days, and we also will look at the GCP data, as we have in the past: For details in English or German, you can go to http://www.kochkyborg.de/Avebury2006/Aveburymain.htm Following that, Lefty and I will go to Stockholm, for a little time preceding the Parapsychological Association annual meeting. I'll present the analysis of 8 years of New Year's data, which shows a very striking pattern of decreased variance a few minutes before midnight, which then relaxes back to normal after the New Year's bell has rung. http://noosphere.princeton.edu/images/images2/ny98-06.var.8yr.gif The number of events that seem likely to affect the GCP is large, but we look at only a few, attempting to sort the major ones from the constant flow. Surprise and uniqueness are big components of what matters. We looked at the data for the news release concerning Zarkawi's death, as a formal event. An accompanying explorations pictured the time he was killed. It is pretty striking. As always, we have to remember that the effect size is so small that single event analyses are not reliable indicators, but even so ... http://noosphere.princeton.edu/images/images2/zarkawi.death.gif Now if we could only picture the death of war. Would that not be nice? It would be a surprise, and unique for sure, and it would evoke compassion and celebration in huge measure. Let's imagine how a graph of that moment would look. Best, Roger GCP/EGG Update June 27 2006I just finished the analysis for the terrible earthquake disaster in Indonesia. The last news I saw indicated more than 3000 dead and 15000 injured. The EGG data show a strong response, and there is a tentative suggestion in the data of a precursor of a couple of hours -- something I have been focusing on recently. You can see the analysis by clicking on the name in the last item of the formal results table at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/results.html The possibility of precursor responses is the topic of a paper I will be presenting at the AAAS meeting June 19-22 in San Diego in a symposium on retrocausation organized by physicist Dan Sheehan. Several others from the anomalies research field will be presenting, and I am looking forward to this somewhat unusual opportunity to present our findings in a mainstream venue. There is a little taste of the data we have at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/earthquakes.html No certainty about this, but the indications justify further examination, and I hope to interest other scientists. At the Society for Scientific Exploration meeting June 8 in Orem, Utah, I will talk about "data mining" as a potentially valuable approach to the GCP/EGG data. We have a background of formal hypothesis tests, but there is reason to believe that we can learn more by expanding the perspective to ask less formal, but still focused questions. The database appears to have more structure than can be seen through our usual analyses, and data mining tools help reveal this. In July Lefty and I will join a group including Ron Russell and Joachim Koch for Project Avebury 2006. More information is at invitation to "join in our Great Meditation on July 22nd, 2006 at 11:00pm British Summer Time." At the Parapsychology Association meeting in Stockholm in August, I'll focus on data mining results for the last 8 New Years Eve events. I may have a chance also to talk about one of the most interesting developments in this vein. Bill Treurniet, who is the author of the EggAnalysis suite, has been exploring "event echoes" and FFT power spectra for some GCP events at http://www.treurniet.ca/GCP/EventEcho.html As Bill says, more work is required, but "the presence of large spectral peaks immediately following selected events is additional support for the hypothesis that the EGGs respond to significant events." Old and much loved computers are vulnerable to wear and tear, and I had to finally accept that my main workstation, which began its continuous run in 2000, would have to be replaced. The complexities of recovering all the data and programs from my old system, plus setting up raid disks and various unfamiliar hardware bits took a long time but is nearly finished. The new machine is fine, but we're still getting to know each other. I hope all goes well for you and yours. And I hope you hold a positive vision for the world at large. The data say this actually matters. Remarkable. What we envision has creative power. We need to use it well. Best, Roger GCP/EGG Update March 18 2006It has been a long time since my last note, and there is a lot to tell about. I was traveling in India from December 10 to February 12, and doing catch-up since then. The EGG network stayed healthy the whole time I was away, producing its unrolling tapestry of data. I had little access to the server, so I couldn't register and analyse formal events as they happened, but did note a few, including the Hadj stampede (which, tragically, is a repetition), the giant mudslide in the Philippines, and the Golden Dome bombing in Iraq. Of course there was New Years, the eighth in our long-running series of formal analyses of the transition, and there's a new twist. We did a thorough assessment of the last seven years to determine what effects are most consistent in the data around midnight, and in what timezones they are strongest. This "data mining" was used to formulate a refined hypothesis to apply to new data. As before, there are two tests, one that compares two measures that have shown consistent trends leading up to midnight, and one predicting a drop in variance to a minimum at midnight, and we use only 13 timezones with large populations. As the Results table shows, for 2006, one outcome was positive, the other negative. Links give more detail (in progress) for those interested in the data-mining approach. And if you are interested in exploring the data yourself, we have a new package for downloading and analysing data from the GCP archives. The software was created by William Treurniet and is called EggAnalysis. More information and a download link at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/egganalysis.html This is a user-friendly application for Windows, in which you can specify the date and time for a data segment to examine. Analyses similar to our primary formal tests are automatically produced in graphical form, and there are options for several other perspectives on the data. William even included a facility for random music driven by the data. He is open to suggestions and will welcome feedback. This is definitely cool -- especially for those with a "hands-on" interest in looking at the data. We have new eggs Bermuda, Taiwan, South Africa, and Spain, and we're working on one in Chile. The number of active eggs remains about the same, between 60 and 65. Occasionally an egg host needs to drop out of the network for some reason, but is remarkable to consider that many of the hosts have participated for several years, some from the beginning of the project in 1998. They are all listed in the table at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/egghosts.html. The world map showing the eggs' placement has been updated and corrected, thanks to a note from Hawaii. Feedback really is helpful. In addition to the egg hosts, there is a long list of people, more than two dozen, who have contributed major chunks of time-consuming work to the project. It goes without saying that the GCP wouldn't exist without them, and I know I speak for everyone reading this when I say we are grateful. There is a listing of "Production Credits" with their names at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/programming.html Our time in India was rich in more ways than I can tell here. I have made a webpage with some travel notes that touch on the most striking experiences, as well as hundreds of pictures, many with annotations -- more to be done. I had a digital camera and often took 50 or 100 photos in a day. Of course only a few are good, but they have a story to tell. Take a look if you have some time to while away. http://noosphere.princeton.edu/roger/india/ While there, I gave formal talks at six places with a range of perspectives from academic to scientific to spiritual. In India, I felt a greater freedom to go beyond the data to talk about interpretations and implications. That is partly because I was "preaching to the choir" and suggesting ideas that are part of the ancient teachings familiar in all the major Indian religions. (An aside: tolerance and respect for many spiritual modes is a beautiful quality of Indian life.) For the next months, my schedule includes a talk March 28th to a Princeton Unitarian group, the SSE meeting in Salt Lake early June, a AAAS symposium on the physics of time in late June, San Diego, a possible visit to Avebury in July, and the PA meeting in Stockholm in August. I'll hope to meet some of you when paths cross. The GCP, represented by Peter Bancel, will show up as a bit of scientific leavening in a National Geographic TV special looking at Prophesy. I don't know the dates, but they originally intended to air in March or April. There is more to tell , but we all get too much to read, so I'll end this with a wish for good health for our planet as well as for all of us. Tall order, given the imbalance of power and wisdom in the world today, but every one of us has the power to add a little wisdom to the scales. And we will. Best, Roger GCP/EGG Update November 21 2005It's been a busy time of travel and meetings, often with people and purposes that are aligned with the GCP's and, most likely, with yours as well. In September, Lefty and I went to Unity Village near Kansas City. It's a beautiful campus that is the center of a worldwide, inclusive spiritual movement. I had a whole morning to talk with ministerial students and others about the technology of research on interactions of consciousness and environment, and the evidence for "Interconnecting Minds: Signs of a Global Consciousness." In late October I joined about 40 other people at a conference in Ashville NC on Universal Awakening. This is a new organization, with a mission to think deeply about how to be active in bringing us to a future that is the product of our highest human capacities. More at http://universal-awakening.org/ A few days ago, I gave a talk at Temple Medical School Grand Rounds for Psychiatry. Interesting experience. Physicians and Psychatrists are very practical people, interested in making things work, so they had solid, skeptical questions, but they could see confirmation of their own subjective insights that touch on how we live in the world -- sometimes with ease, other times with immense difficulty. Our friends at the Lifebridge Foundation have just opened the Lifebridge Sanctuary, a retreat setting for non-profits who are looking for a beautiful private space for group reflection, creative thinking and cutting edge conversation. For further information: http://www.lifebridge.org/sanctuary We have a couple of new eggs, and we have lost a couple of long-running eggs to the difficulties of networking in a time of spam and virus-hacking. Getting our data through firewalls was not a consideration in 1998, but it is now. An interesting sign of both the longevity of the project and of the changing nature of our technological interconnectedness. Some aspects grow more transparent, but others more obscure. It makes me think of the truly immense tasks before us as "masters of our destiny." The tools we create as the newest and best manifestations of our creativity and potential come with complexities and side effects, unintended consequences, that are potent, and definitely not planned for. It is daunting to envision the developing ensemble of human progress (which seems sometimes to point in the other direction -- but our work suggests that positive expectations are the way to go.) The formal event sequence that is the primary analysis for theGCP includes samples both positive and negative, but one of the clearest results continues to be that compassion is a defining characteristic of the events that most strongly affect the EGG network. That should be no surprise, of course, because this is the common ground or core of the interactive, interdependent group or global consciousness that we're touching. While traveling in December and January I probably will have occasional access to the Internet, but less than usual. Email will continue to be the best way to contact me. Perhaps I'll send out another note before leaving, but if not, let me wish you now the best for the next coming holidays, wherever you may be. Best, Roger GCP/EGG Update 2 October 2005I am happy to report that the noosphere server is up, as of the 30th Sept, after just a day of down time. My wizard son Greg helped establish that there was no damage, and our best guess is that the basic problem was a transient hardware glitch. We were concerned by a flood of data requests that looked like a denial of service attack, but it seems these were just a secondary manifestation of a temporarary memory overload. The delicate balance of facilities and structures in computer systems is amazing, and it is interesting to focus on that remarkable presence in the world. I must admit to some level of anxiety while the server was down. It is easy to become accustomed to our tools and facilities just being there, and a lapse reveals something of our intimate dependencies. I actually missed the noosphere server and the GCP's lively presence in my every day. And that is such a trivial matter compared to the enormous losses suffered from Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf states and New Orleans. What a lesson, if only we would step back and learn from it. So, I am happy we're back online, not least because it is possible to look at the EGG network's response to Katrina. The primary test on the first day was not significant, but the next few days show variance fluctuations almost as large as those on Sept 11 2001. (Linked from Results table.) This is a perspective we will study more carefully in future analyses, as part of a focus on learning more about effective measures and their interpretation. Again I commend to you the earthquake analyses by Peter Bancel. There is plenty of careful work to do before we can fully understand the potential and confidently interpret this work, but it is exciting. Have a look. The direct URL is http://noosphere.princeton.edu/earthquakes.html, and especially the last part, on "precursor" indications. Some new events have been added to the Results table, including Katrina, the tragic stampede in Baghdad, and the recent rally against the Iraq war in Washington. If I have time before leaving, there is also an un-analysed prediction concerning the terrorist bombings in Bali that will be added. http://noosphere.princeton.edu/results.html There are also some new musical interpretations of GCP data at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/music.html by Phillip Wood and by Jeff Robertson. Links are at the bottom of the page. And though I haven't seen it yet, Mike Leznoff has made an animation of the changing tapestry that appears on the home page. He says "the motion accentuates the bilateral patterns -- it's almost hypnotic...." I'll put a piece of that on the website when it becomes available. I can also introduce some new egg hosts. The most recent are Adam Ward in Taiwan, and Walter Cooke in Bermuda. In the past few months we also have added eggs in Mexico, Natalie Larrode, in Estonia, Henri Laupmaa, in Malasia, Arthur Eeckart, in Colombia, Sergio Carvajal, and Argentina, Andres Kievsky. Not sure I introduced all of these folks in previous notes. Nice to be back in business. It would be still nicer if all the reporting in my update were about pleasant, positive events. But as they say, "It's all good." For sure it is all what it is, and accepting "what is" must be the first step in creating what will be. Best, Roger GCP/EGG Update 20 September 2005I have been feeling it is time for an update for a while, and now have a particular need to send one. The noosphere server is down, as of late on the 29th Sept, so there is no access to the website, nor can the eggs report their current data. So this update is partly a note to egg hosts to let you all know the situation. Your eggs will continue to store data for reporting when the server is up and running again. I hope it will turn out to be a minor problem but I will not be able to determine this until later today. When we're back online, one item you may find especially interesting is the continuing earthquake analysis by Peter Bancel. Previously I wrote about the clear indications of an effect that is evidently dependent on the importance of major quakes to human consciousness. There is also information that can help us think about the nature of the GCP/EGG network response, including theoretically important issues such as locality. Peter's most recent work shows the time course of the response, and it appears that it begins well before the primary temblor of the earthquakes. This is (as always in our data) a subtle correlation, so it typically does not show in a single event, but requires signal averaging over many earthquakes. (The huge tsunami quake is an exception, and it does show the general pattern.) I hope you will be able to look at these findings soon. The direct URL is http://noosphere.princeton.edu/earthquakes.html I will make this short, and will send another update as soon as the server is available. We have had some major events, I will make this short, and will send another update as soon as the server is available. We have had some major events, including the disaster in New Orleans and the gulf states in the US. As you may guess, it is odd to write to you about what you might be interested in looking at if only the noosphere server were running. My best to you all, Roger |