In speculating about the nature and limits of psi phenomena parapsychologist Dean Radin posed an intriguing question. Are we dealing with a personal perceptual skill that can be used to our private advantage, like an improved form of visual acuity or more sensitive hearing, or is something bigger going on, something that transcends the individual altogether? If psi is real, as the experimental results strongly suggest, then
“in the same way that networks of neurons combine to form our brains, maybe psi forms an interconnective web of brain/minds that results in a collective mind” (Radin, 2009
How to study such a phenomenon poses an intriguing challenge. Perhaps, Radin speculated, if a group of people engaged in some highly focused activity and it did bring about a significantly increased order or coherence in their mental activity, this might infuse the environment with an “ordering field” that could be detectable. Random number generators (RNGs) seemed the logical choice to do this as they had been shown in studies of psychokinesis to detect mind-matter interactions. RNGs are designed to produce pure randomness or entropy and any fluctuations in entropy can be detected using statistical procedures. They can be programmed to automatically run in the background where they function as a kind of passive observer of mind-matter interactions.
In 1997 an opportunity to test this idea presented itself. On August 31st Princess Diana and her companion Dodi al-Fayed were killed in a car accident in Paris, an event that was featured in the world’s news broadcasts for the next few days. Radin and others interested in field consciousness decided to use her upcoming funeral to be broadcast live worldwide with hundreds of millions of expected viewers as an opportunity to examine the possibility of global mental coherence. A dozen researchers with RNGs located throughout the United States and Europe each ran them before, during, and after the funeral. The combined outputs of the 12 RNGs yielded a significant deviation, with odds against chance of 100 to 1, in alignment with the predicted effect.
The researchers ran a similar study when Mother Theresa died only a few days after Princess Diana, but the results were not significant. The difference between the two outcomes, they speculated, might lie with the fact that Mother Theresa was 87 when she died and known to be in poor health. Although her funeral was also broadcast live, the proceedings were conducted in several languages without translation, and the quality of the broadcast pictures was poor. These factors might have reduced the extent of highly focused attention associated with the Princess Diana funeral.
The success of the Princess Diana experiment and the failure the one involving Mother Teresa convinced Radin and the other researchers that “global mind” experiments should be pursued. In that same year The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) was initiated under the leadership of Princeton psychologist Roger Nelson. The idea was that within several minutes of major news events attracting worldwide attention a degree of mental coherence would result that could be measured by RNGs located around the world.
Radin explains how this would work by asking us to imagine a vast, windswept ocean with scores of buoys dancing in the waves. Each buoy has a bell attached to it to alert passing ships about hidden dangers. The sounds from each buoy’s bell are broadcast by radio to a central receiving station on land. This station receives the transmissions from all the buoys and consolidates them to form a single collective tone reflecting the “ocean’s grand dance.” Most of the time there would be no pattern to this sound. But imagine that every so often these buoys that are isolated from one another by thousands of miles “mysteriously synchronize and swell into a great harmonic chord.” This would alert us that something large has affected the entire ocean. Whatever the cause might be when the random bell tones spontaneously “coalesce into a great chord,” we would be interested in two types of analyses. One would be how loud it is, that is, the amplitude of the tone, and the second how coherent it is, the degree of its harmony.
The Global Consciousness Project, Radin tells us, can be considered analogous to monitoring the ocean’s surface for the presence of a tsunami. In this case researchers are not looking for massive movements of water and trying to infer what is happening in the depths of a great ocean, but are monitoring “massive movements of entropy generated by a network of RNGs” and attempting to infer what is happening in “the depths of a grand mind.”
“Each random number generator (RNG) in the GCP network is attached to a computer that collects one sample of 200 bits per second. Every five minutes all data are automatically assembled and sent over the internet to a central web server located in Princeton, New Jersey. RNGs located in many places around the world were set up that would run continuously and automatically to see whether large scale coherence was generated during both events that are planned, like New Year’s Eve celebrations, and, also during unexpected events, like natural disasters, the tragic deaths of celebrities, and terrorist attacks” (Radin, 2009).
One unique event that was studied was what was known as Y2K. On the stroke of midnight from 1999 to 2000 many people around the world feared a worldwide computer meltdown. Radin predicted that as each time zone approached midnight the increasingly coherent attention of millions of people would increase the order detected by the RNGs. When he analyzed the data this turned out to be the case. The variance or “noise” among the RNGs dropped precipitously at the stroke of midnight. The probability of observing a drop of this magnitude in comparison to similarly generated random data is associated with odds against chance of 1,300 to 1.
No doubt the most dramatic event in recent history was the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. As might be expected, numerous striking changes were recorded by the 36 involved RNGs. Radin suggests that to understand the nature of these anomalies, to appreciate why the results the researchers found are not due to any number of mundane flaws or mistakes, it’s important to understand the nature of the data collected. Each RNG in the network continually generates sequences of random bits, and, if they sampled periodically, they form a distribution resembling a bell-shaped curve. There are four simple ways, he points out, that a bell curve can deviate from a theoretically perfect bell shape. It can be shifted to the left as compared to chance expectation, shifted to the right, squashed flat or squashed thin. The first two deviations in this case are not suitable because there is no clear way of predicting which direction the curve might shift. The focus in these studies was on the second two methods, how the width of the bell curve changes from one day to the next.
“In examining the results of their analysis, the researchers noticed that on September 11, 2001, the curve deviated wildly as compared to all the other days they examined, June 16 – 20. The curve peaked nearly two hours before a hijacked jet crashed into World Trade Tower at 8:46 a.m. EDT, and dropped to its lowest point around 2 p.m., roughly eight hours later. The huge drop in the curve within an eight-hour period was the single largest drop for any day in the year 2001. The GCP “bell rang loudest “ on that day because all of the RNGs behaved in the same way, even though they were scattered around the world, hundreds to thousands of miles apart” (Radin, 2009).
Radin pointed out, however, that positive results in field consciousness studies don’t necessarily prove that coherent states of mind literally influence the environment. What they reveal is that intention and RNG outputs are correlated, and correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation. The movement of sunflowers over the course of the day is closely correlated to the apparent movement of the sun, but sunflowers do not cause the sun to move. In this example we know what causes what; the direction of causation is simply reversed. In circumstance involving mind-matter interactions determining what causes what isn’t so obvious.
Radin proposed that one way to examine the question as to whether mind-matter coherence effects are actually caused by mind would be to see whether mind interactions with nonliving systems such as RNGs would also simultaneously correspond to changes in a living system. He teamed up with molecular biologists Ryan Taft and Garret Yount from the California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) Research Institute to conduct experiments similar to those mind-living systems investigations previously described but with the added element that any field consciousness effect would also be investigated. Their procedure involved exposing cultures of astrocytes, the most abundant cell type in the human brain, to healing intention to see whether this would increase their rate of growth compared to when they were not so exposed. For a nonliving target-system they used three RNGs, each based upon a different type of random source.
This procedure lent itself to the examination of still another question. Would healing intention practiced repeatedly at the same location change the actual physical site itself into a healing location? Stories of spontaneous healings at sacred sites such as Lourdes suggested that perhaps with sufficient exposure those sites themselves might generate healing properties similar to those produced by a healer. Stories also abound of particular physical and psychological sensations repeatedly being experienced at traditionally haunted sites, again suggesting that certain physical sites become charged with some kind of energy. Of course, in both cases there is a strong possibility that such effects could be brought about by the expectations of those reporting them.
The researchers conducted a three-day experiment involving four experienced Johrei practitioners. Johrei is a Japanese spiritual healing practice based on the concept of a universal spiritual force or energy that can be cultivated and directed by intention. When focused on the body this energy raises its spiritual vibrations bringing about improved health and spiritual purification.
The experimental procedure involved cultured human brain cells that were placed inside a thermally insulated box. Treatment sessions took place within an electromagnetically and acoustically shielded chamber. During a treatment session a Johrei practitioner directed his healing intention toward the box from about two feet away for 25 minutes without touching the box. This process was repeated four times a day for each of three days with healing sessions and control sessions being randomly alternated. Ten days later, the cells in all flasks were “fixed” to stop further cell growth. Two lab analysts not otherwise involved in the experiment independently counted the number of cell colonies in each flask. Two RNGs were hidden behind a curtain inside the shielded room and a third RNG was located six feet outside the shielded room in a hidden location. This one was a computer-monitored Geiger counter device that monitored background ionizing radiation, including ambient alpha, beta, gamma, and X-ray particles, in 10-second samples.
The results indicated that repeated exposure to Johrei treatment resulted in increased brain cell growth, whereas there was no such increase among untreated cells. The odds against chance of this effect was 1,100 to 1. Examination of the results of the three RNGs indicated that the three devices combined produced a peak response in the morning of the third day with odds against chance of 1.3 million to 1. Each of the three RNGs independently peaked at the same time. Both the treated cell cultures and three RNGs significantly deviated from chance at around the same time on the third day. The researchers carefully considered and ruled out alternative explanations for the results. This experiment, Radin points out, “suggested that certain forms of focused attention appear to causally influence both living and nonliving systems.
To investigate the possible influence of distance on this effect, Radin obtained data from 36 other RNGs located from 24 to 10,500 miles from the lab that were not part of this experiment but had been set up to run continuously as part of another investigation. Comparing measures of deviation in the three RNGs in the lab with similar measures for the distant RNGs revealed strong evidence of a distance effect with odds against chance of 37,000 to 1″ To further explore this distance effect the combined deviations from chance in the five RNGs located within 100 miles of the lab were compared with six RNGs located 6,000 or more miles away. The five closer RNGs peaked significantly above chance at the same time as the three in the lab, whereas the six distant RNGs hovered around chance. The combined effect for the three RNGs in the lab and the five nearby was associated with odds against chance of 5 million to 1. These results suggested that healing intention can act at a distance, but perhaps not at arbitrarily long distances.
One characteristic of psi, Radin noted, as revealed by both spontaneous reports and in lab tests, is that psi is not tightly bound to “now,” in either space or time. But there is also evidence, like the results of this experiment, that psi may not be completely independent of distance.
Other than Radin’s unique effort investigating mental influence on both living systems and RNGs just described, the field consciousness studies so far discussed have involved highly dramatic major global events. Radin wondered if ordinary daily fluctuations in the world’s attention to news accounts might also influence the RNGs. As an objective measure of newsworthy events, he used all of the news events listed in the “Year in Review” feature on the Information Please Web site for the year 2001, a total of 394 news events for 250 days. If the Global Consciousness Project network of RNGs was actually responding to the world’s attention to global events, Radin predicted that those 250 newsworthy days would have a larger average inter-correlation value than the remaining 115 non-newsworthy days. This turned out to be correct with odds against chance of 100 to 1.
It would seem that field consciousness may well be a reality. Just what that may mean and how it fits with the world as we know it are intriguing questions.
Radin, D. (2009). Entangled Minds.