Interview with Roger Nelson, Founder and Director of the Global Consciousness Project
You began your career as an Experimental Psychologist examining Cognition. What career path took you to becoming Director of the GCP?
After 8 interesting years as a Professor at a College in Vt, teaching research methods in psychology, among other things, to undergrads who often wanted to study parapsychology, I decided to take a job at Princeton in what became the PEAR laboratory. I coordinated the research projects, including mind-machine interaction experiments using random event generators. In the early 90’s my long-standing wish for continuous recording of REG data, with marking of special moments, was implemented.
This, combined with miniaturized REG equipment, made it possible to take the REG out of the lab for what we called FieldREG experiments, looking at effects of group consciousness at concerts, ceremonies, sporting events, rituals, meetings, etc. I saw the obvious implication of large, distributed groups, ultimately of global scope.
After some prototype efforts, such as the funeral of Princess Diana, when I asked friends and colleagues to collect data and send it to me, the value of a permanent network collecting continuous data was clear. So, I gathered resources and collegial energies and founded the GCP in 1997, and began collecting data in 1998.
You have conducted many experiments on micro-PK that were not part of the GCP. Which of these really caught your attention or enthusiasm?
I have to admit I like them all, and usually for several reasons, some scientific, some aesthetic. One thing we focused on at PEAR was the question of what differences in physical systems would matter, so we made experiments with electronics, macroscopic objects like 3/4 inch balls, fluid dynamic, optical, and mechanical systems, and so on. What most caught my attention was the upshot — given a sensible standard for comparisons, the equipment or the physical device did not matter. For an hour of invested time trying to impose intention on any delicately balanced, sensitive physical system, we get about the same size effect. Given this fact, I like the electronic REG/RNG devices for experiments because they are stable, adaptable, and very well characterized.
Assuming you have willing hosts - do you think there are an optimal number of EGGs in the GCP project? Do you think things can (or should?) keep scaling upwards?
One of the implied questions in our basic hypothesis is whether distance matters. The distribution of some 65 EGGs we now have is adequate, and would not be improved much by greater numbers. It would help to have a more homogeneous distribution, but that isn’t possible with the world’s current technology and infrastructure. Some parts of the world have almost no Internet connectivity, or even stable electricity. My current policy is to add eggs only in under-represented areas of the world.
On a broader note - how do you see the state of contemporary parapsychology?
Parapsychology has matured somewhat during the 30 years I’ve been involved. There is more attention than ever to modeling, and to asking deeper questions. Attention has shifted for many researchers away from existence proofs and efforts to persuade skeptics. There is still interest in persuading mainstream, but I think most of us realize that will come in proportion to the sophistication and clarity of our internal dialogues and understanding.
Aside from “Consciousness Research”, what other areas of science do you particularly follow?
I read widely, but time does not allow me to study other areas deeply. So, I know the headlines and appreciate the summaries in pretty much all of science. Because it helps in thinking about what happens in my work, I do pay attention to discussions at the leading edge of quantum physics, and to any efforts to integrate consciousness into physical models.
Thanks Roger.
