Roger Nelson , Ph.D.

Roger Nelson, Ph.D., was Coordinator of Research at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory at Princeton University from 1980 to 2002, and has directed the Global Consciousness Project (GCP), since its inception in 1997.

Interests in psychology, physics, philosophy and the arts have given opportunities to collaborate with creative interdisciplinary teams at PEAR and elsewhere developing ways to study consciousness and intention. Roger’s work integrates science and spirituality, including research that is directly focused on numinous communal experiences.

Building on years of laboratory experiments, Roger began using random event generator (REG) technology in the field to study effects of special states of group consciousness. This led naturally to the GCP, which is designed to register indications of a coalescing global consciousness responding to major world events such as 9/11, the beginnings of war, or New Year’s Eve.

Speculative interpretations suggest that we may be looking at some form of consciousness field. Though we don’t have a full explanation, this frontier research provides evidence of interconnection and interaction of our minds with the environment. It is consonant with ancient and modern ideas about a nascent greater consciousness.

    Presentations

    IRVA 2009 – The World-Spanning View of Global Consciousness

    The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international scientific collaboration. We record continuous parallel data sequences from physical random sources located around the world. The resulting database is assessed for correlations with physical and social variables. We ask whether the random sequences contain periods of structure during pre-specified global events. According to standard physical theory, there should be no structure at all in these random data. Yet, we find that many of the events we examine are associated with inter-node correlations in the network. Special times like the celebrations of New Years, and tragic events like the attacks on September 11, 2001, show changes that apparently are linked to shared periods of deep engagement or widespread emotional reactions. We have conducted a series of over 275 formal tests of the basic hypothesis predicting statistical deviations in data collected during events that evoke mass consciousness. The results for ten years of continuous running indicate a small but highly significant correlation, with odds on the order of 10 million to one against chance.

    IRVA 2009 – Panel Discussion:Remote Viewing and the Nature of Consciousness

    The nature of consciousness is a hot-button topic today. Psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and other professionals continue to engage in an ongoing debate as to what consciousness means. In reality, we may never know. Is it a product of the biological and classical physical interactions of the human brain; or is it something more fundamental, perhaps electromagnetic, or the result of quantum physics principles that we don’t yet fully understand. Could it be something even more profound than that — something beyond the scope of science and physics, any kind of physics, for us to understand?

    Because consciousness seems to play a central role in remote viewing, and the underlying faculty that makes remote viewing work may be central to consciousness, this year’s conference committee invites panel members with differing views and expertise to address this question: Just what is the connection between remote viewing and consciousness, and what does it tells us about human nature?

    Video