Detecting Mass Consciousness: Effects of Globally Shared Attention and Emotion

A long term research program called the Global Consciousness Project is designed to identify and study effects of mass consciousness engendered by shared attention and emotion. An operationally defined “global consciousness” appears to result from interactions of human beings around the world. We find statistical evidence for small effects from this source in the output of a network of devices which use quantum tunneling to generate random numbers. Detectable changes occur during great events of importance to humans, in which synchronized data collected at independent network nodes separated by thousands of kilometers become correlated. The correlations show that when the attention and emotions of large numbers of people are driven toward coherence by great tragedies or great celebrations, a slight but detectable structure is imposed on our random data. The bottom line formal statistic shows a 6-sigma departure from expectation over the full 12-year database. This is evidence that human consciousness and emotion are part of the physical world, and the design of the experiment suggests a particular interpretation: we interact to produce a mass consciousness even though we are generally unaware that this is possible.