Winter Solstice Meditations Dec 21 2017

I received an email from an old friend, Joachim Koch, in Germany. He included a description of a new meditation event and suggested we take a look at the corresponding GCP data: "On Dec. 21st, 2017, the Winter Solstice, I have organized another larger meditation, called the "Earth Peace Project (EPP)". Our meditation time is between 5pm and 6 pm with a focus around 5:30 pm Maybe you find the time and might have a look at the data if we could create any reaction of your REGs."

While our events are usually longer (e.g., 6 hours) we do have a look at well defined shorter periods, often meditations very like this. We also look at whole days when there are many organized events which are related, such as peace demonstrations or meditations. The figures below show first the 1 hour event described by Joachim, and then the 24 hour result, with the single hour marked as "EPP".

Specific Hypothesis and Results

The exploratory event called EPP was set for 5 pm to 6 pm CET (16:00 to 17:00 UTC). The result is a fairly steady trend downward, which we have often seen for meditations, especially those engaging trained meditators and groups. As we note in the general caveat about the graphic displays, single events can't be reliably interpreted. But we can say that this case conforms to similar events, and has a terminal Z-score of -1.648. The second graph below shows the whole day, which is context for the EPP event, and also includes possible influence from other meditations and celebrations of the solstice around the world.

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 general 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.