In August 1998 two US Embassies in Africa were bombed by terrorists. This shredding of the social contract protecting diplomacy shocked the world, and the hours around the explosions became the first formal event monitored by the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). Over the next 17 years 500 rigorously specified tests were made of the GCP’s general hypothesis that major events on the world stage would correspond to detectable changes in the data from our network of dozens of random number generators (RNG).

We looked at a variety of different categories of events, allowing some analysis of what characteristics seemed most conducive to the correlations found in the data apparently linked to the shared thoughts and emotions of people around the world. The overall effect size in the formal data is about one-third of a standard deviation, but over the 500 replications of the hypothesis test, this modest difference accumulates to a 7-sigma departure from expectation, and trillion-to-one odds against chance fluctuation as an explanation. This strong finding provides a basis for deeper examination of the data both to understand better how the effects arise, as well as to develop interpretations and applications.

We will consider several recent assessments of possible correlations of GCP data with external variables that are independent of the event-based analyses of the original project. These new analyses use a variety of methods including time-series, correlational, and multi-scale entropy analysis.

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Published on November 17, 2023