AbstractIntroductionReferencesGCP Sept 11, Roger Nelson, for JSE Not for Distribution pg 1 of 27 01/15/19Coherent Consciousness and Reduced Randomness:Correlations on September 11, 2001Roger D. Nelson*Director, Global Consciousness Project, Princeton, New JerseyAbstractThe Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international collaboration of researchers studying interactions of consciousness with the environment. The GCP maintains a network of random event generators (REGs) located in some 40 host sites around the world. 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 fundamentally unpredictable array of values contains periods of detectable non-random structure that may be correlated with global events. In this paper we examine the data from September 11, 2001, for evidence of an anomalous interaction driving the REGs to non-random behavior. Three formal analyses were made, testing hypotheses based on standardized procedures for making predictions and performing a statistical evaluation. A number of secondary analyses, including work by five independent analysts, provide additional perspective, and examine the context of several days before and after the major events. The results indicate that a substantial increase in structure was correlated with the most intense and widely shared periods of emotional reactions to the events. The non-random behavior cannot be attributed to ordinary sources such as electrical disturbances or high cell phone volume. Thus the anomalous structure is somehow related to the unusually coherent focus of human attention on these extraordinary events.IntroductionA glimpse of the extraordinary span of human consciousness may have come from the horrific events of September 11, 2001. As we all know, beginning at about 8:45 in the morning, a series of terrorist attacks destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) and severely damaged the Pentagon. Commercial airliners were hijacked and flown directly into the three buildings. The first crashed into the North tower at 8:45 and about 18 minutes later the second *Correspondence may be directed to [email protected] Sept 11, Roger Nelson, for JSE Not for Distribution pg 2 of 27 01/15/19airliner hit the South tower. At about 9:40, a third airliner crashed into the Pentagon. A fourth hijacked plane crashed in Pennsylvania, apparently due to the heroic self-sacrifice of the passengers. At about 9:58, the South WTC tower collapsed, followed by the North tower at 10:28. Thanks to CNN, BBC and other media, human beings all over the planet were simultaneously feeling horror, shock, fear, dismay and fascination with the same images and sounds. We were forged by the events into a collective consciousness tuned to a single frequency. In apparent correspondence, over the course of this tragic day, a world-spanning network of electronic devices exhibited unmistakable patterns where there should have been none.Without question, these events and the powerful reactions around the world qualified as a “global event”. As such, this was an obvious case study for the Global Consciousness Project (GCP), an international collaboration involving researchers from several institutions and countries, set up to explore whether objective measurement might reveal correlations between inferred special states of consciousness on a global scale and the behavior of physical devices.The project builds on experiments conducted over the past 35 years at a number of laboratories, demonstrating that human consciousness can interact with true random event generators (REGs), to somehow induce non-random patterns that are correlated with intentional, mental efforts (Radin and Nelson, 1989). For example, small changes in the proportion of 1s and 0s areassociated with participants’ attempts to change the distribution of numbers produced by a true random event generator in controlled experiments. The results show a tiny but significant correlation with the participants’ assigned intentions (Jahn et al., 1997). The replicated demonstrations of anomalous mind/machine interactions clearly show that a broader examination of this phenomenon is warranted, and the research continues in a number of laboratories.Variations on the theme include “FieldREG” studies that take the REG device into the field to see whether group interactions might affect the random data (Nelson et al., 1996, 1998a). In related work, prior to the Global Consciousness Project, an array of REG devices in Europe andGCP Sept 11, Roger Nelson, for JSE Not for Distribution pg 3 of 27 01/15/19the U.S.A. showed non-random activity during widely shared experiences of deeply engaging events. For example, the funeral ceremonies for Princess Diana created shared emotions and a coherence of consciousness that appeared to be correlated with structure in the otherwise random data (Nelson et al., 1998b). Instead of the expected, unpredictable sequence of random numbers, small changes in the mean value indicated that something had introduced a non-random element that structured the sequence, making it slightly more predictable. In graphical terms, instead of a random walk (a “drunkard’s” walk), the data sequence showed a steady trend.These experiments were prototypes for the Global Consciousness Project. In the fully developed project, a world-spanning network of some 40 devices collect data continuously and send it to a central server in Princeton, New Jersey, via the Internet. The system is designed to create a continuous record of nominally random data over months and years, gathered from a wide distribution of locations. Its purpose is to document and display any subtle effects of humanity’s collective consciousness as we react simultaneously to global events. Our research hypothesis predicts the appearance of increasing coherence and structure, or non-random trends,in the globally distributed data collected during major events in the world. The events that comprise the sample of test cases share a common feature, namely, that they powerfully engage human attention all around the world, and draw us in large numbers into a common focus.I take responsibility for the descriptions in this paper, but I will use collective pronouns to represent the collaborative nature of this work. I also want to acknowledge the