Gathering of Global Mind

The Global Consciousness Project is an international collaboration of researchers studying interactions of consciousness with the environment. We maintain a network of detectors located around the world in over 50 host sites ranging from Alaska to New Zealand. These devices generate random data continuously and send it for archiving to a dedicated server in Princeton, New Jersey. The data are analyzed to determine whether the unpredictable sequence of random values contains periods of detectable structure that may be correlated with deeply engrossing or meaningful global events. This paper describes the scientific lineage of the project and provides a background for interpreting the data, which contain significant departures from expectation suggestive of something like our hypothesized global consciousness, or of equally remarkable "observer" effects. According to standard physical theory, there should be no structure at all in random data. Yet, we find that many of the identified cases exhibit striking patterns. Special times like the celebrations of New Years, and tragic events like the attacks on September 11, 2001, show substantial changes that are correlated with shared periods of deep engagement or widespread emotional reactions. Our analyses establish that the non-random behavior cannot be attributed to mundane sources such as electrical grid stresses or ordinary electromagnetic fields. The evidence suggests instead that the anomalous structure we see is somehow related to the unusually coherent focus of human attention generated by extraordinary events.