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The same happened with the Asian Tsunami. Twenty four hours before the tragedy unfolded, the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers began. Curiously, it was at around this time that animals in the path of the tsunami began fleeing for their lives. Very few animals were killed in the tragedy, as you may remember, leading some to ask whether they had somehow foreseen the disaster.
In 1998 he gathered together scientists from all over the world to try and understand the phenomena. They, too, were stumped and resolved to extend and deepen Jahn and Nelson’s work. The Global Consciousness Project was born.
Since then, the project has expanded massively. A total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the ‘eyes’ of the project. And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure. The Eggs not only ‘sensed’ the moment that Princess Diana was buried, but also the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the Kursk tragedy and America’s hung election of 2000. The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations such as New Year’s Eve. Even more bizarrely, they sense the celebrations as they sweep through the Earth’s different time zones.
The project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11th 2001. As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs. Not only did they register the event as it happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers began four hours before the two planes hit the Twin Towers.
The problem is that people outside their lab either fail to reach the same conclusions or find their methodology so flawed that it's pointless to even review the findings. They do publish what they call criticism on their web site, but it's mainly comments and suggestions from their associates. There is not a lot of published criticism of Global Consciousness out there to cite, and one reason is that their theory lacks consistent claims that are specific enough to be tested. Here are two fundamental questions that they must answer and have not:
1. What type of event qualifies as "significant"? They pick events themselves, without any defined criteria. When they choose an event, they fail to test if there are any other simultaneous events in other parts of the world that might override any effect. What happened in Ghana during the OJ Simpson trial? There are no controls over what types of event triggers an examination of the data, and no controls to eliminate prospective events due to conflicting events.
2. What type of effect in the data constitutes a result? Again, no criteria. They maintain no standards for what constitutes a correlation: whether it's a trough or a spike or some other type of anomaly; whether it should happen before, during, or after the event; how long before or after the event it should be found, or what the duration should be. In fact, their "results" are all over the map.
So, as they look for undefined results from undefined events, they still manage to make additional errors in their methodology. Here are some of the most flagrant:
1.The analysis is not blinded in any way. When something happens, they look at their data until they find patterns. Proper analysis would come from isolated statisticians with no reference indicating a timeline on the data, knowledge of what to look for, or knowledge of what world event is being matched.
2. They do not look for alternate causes of their data anomalies. Sunspots? Cell phone calls?
3. They make claims of specific numbers for how they beat chance. Clearly, it's impossible to have any meaningful metrics, given the lack of standards for scoring or choosing events.
4. They make no attempts to falsify their theory. They should be looking for alternate causes of the anomalies they claim to find in the output from their eggs, such as sunspots or electromagnetic interference from other devices. They should be looking for alternate or additional effects caused by human emotions, like errors in calculators or digital watches. Why not cell phones or toasters? If this effect is real, their eggs would not be the only things affected. Whenever a Global Consciousness event happens, there should be well known and well established failures of, or anomalies in, electric and/or computerized devices worldwide. It's improbable that these supposed effects would seek out and affect only one specific application of common hardware components used in many other devices. They do not look at other species besides humans whose emotions might be responsible for the effects. Why not dolphins or whales, or for that matter ants? Most of the living matter on earth is ants, and ants certainly have collective behavior. If collective consciousness did have a measurable affect on hardware, ants are the first place I would look.
One of their biggest claims to fame is the finding of a massive data anomaly, stronger than any other found, at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Radin calculated that it was 6000:1 that this spike in the data was due to chance. Such a finding would make sense if the theory were true (although 9/11 probably didn't bother very many ants). You'll hear this result time and time again if you listen to one of Radin's lectures or read their materials. But you will have to go out on your own to find a dissenting opinion, which can be heard from anyone else who has actually looked at their data. One such person is Jeffrey Scargle of the NASA Ames Research Center, who undertook an analysis on his own time. Scargle's finding on the 9/11 data was "I personally disagree with the conclusion that anomalous effects have been unequivocally established" and "I judge the degree of cogency of all of the results in both (Radin's and Nelson's) papers as low." Scargle attributes their positive findings to the questionable application of an XOR filter to the raw data, the use of a discredited "p-value" test, the lack of blinding, limited choice of likely effects, and a suspicious process that he describes as "data fiddling".
Dr. Edwin May and James Spottiswoode also performed an independent analysis of Radin's 9/11 results. Their conclusion states in part:
We show that the choice was fortuitous in that had the analysis window been a few minutes shorter or 30 minutes longer, the formal test would not have achieved significance... We differ markedly with regard to the posted conclusions. Using Radin’s analysis, we do not find significant evidence that the GCP network’s EGG’s responded to the New York City attacks in real time. Radin’s computation of 6000:1 odds against chance during the events are accounted for by a not-unexpected local deviation that occurred approximately 3 hours before the attacks. We conclude that the network random number generators produced data consistent with mean chance.
The Psyleron random event generator (REG) is a device that converts quantum-level physical phenomena into a digital output. Prevailing theories in quantum mechanics contend that these outputs are intrinsically random and follow a predictable statistical distribution.
However, some scientists have found exceptions. Researchers at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory at Princeton University, for example, have found that the human mind is capable of influencing the output of such an REG to alter its statistical distribution. The mechanism by which this occurs is unknown, and is not based on known physical effects such as electromagnetic fields. The researchers' conclusion was that a subtle yet direct connection exists between the mind and the physical world.