Talk about Brainwaves!

Asymmetrical Information links to a fascinating article about

a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.

The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.

How does it work? It began with

a humble-looking black box known as a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers - a one and a zero - in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper.

The pattern of ones and noughts - 'heads' and 'tails' as it were - could then be printed out as a graph. The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve....

Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'....

Dr [Roger] Nelson...extended [this] work by taking random number machines to group meditations, which were very popular in America at the time. Again, the results were eyepopping. The groups were collectively able to cause dramatic shifts in the patterns of numbers....

Using the internet, he [then] connected up 40 random event generators from all over the world to his laboratory computer in Princeton. These ran constantly, day in day out, generating millions of different pieces of data. Most of the time, the resulting graph on his computer looked more or less like a flat line.

But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm....

For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey....

So, in 1998, [Dr. Nelson] gathered together scientists from all over the world to analyse his findings....The Global Consciousness Project was born.

Since then, the project has expanded massively. A total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the 'eyes' of the project.

And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure.

For during the course of the experiment, the Eggs have 'sensed' a whole series of major world events as they were happening, from the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia to the Kursk submarine tragedy to America's hung election of 2000....

But the project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11, 2001.

As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs.

Not only had they registered the attacks as they actually happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers had begun four hours before the two planes even hit the Twin Towers....

What could be happening? Was it a freak occurrence, perhaps?

Apparently not. For in the closing weeks of December last year, the machines went wild once more.

Twenty-four hours later, an earthquake deep beneath the Indian Ocean triggered the tsunami which devastated South-East Asia, and claimed the lives of an estimated quarter of a million people....

Cynics will quite rightly point out that there is always some global event that could be used to 'explain' the times when the Egg machines behaved erratically. After all, our world is full of wars, disasters and terrorist outrages, as well as the occasional global celebration. Are the scientists simply trying too hard to detect patterns in their raw data?

The team behind the project insist not. They claim that by using rigorous scientific techniques and powerful mathematics it is possible to exclude any such random connections....

It is possible - in theory - that time may not just move forwards but backwards, too. And if time ebbs and flows like the tides in the sea, it might just be possible to foretell major world events. We would, in effect, be 'remembering' things that had taken place in our future.

For lots more, go to the website of the Global Consciousness Project. Among the links is one to an interview of Dr. Nelson, who strikes me as rather spacy. At the end of the interview with Dr. Nelson, the interviewer appends a statement by physicist Tom van Flandern:

I am extremely skeptical of “statistically significant” results that are so close to what chance would produce. There comes a point in any analysis at which systematic, rather than random, errors dominate, invalidating statistical conclusions. And when working so close to chance probabilities, it may be impossible to think of all the hidden ways that systematic errors might arise. To be intrinsically convincing, we need to see the result of a controlled, double-blind test that is well above what chance can produce. Until then, the default assumption must remain that no such phenomena exist.

Another link is to a paper by Brian D. Josephson, a Cambridge University physicist, who explains why thoughts might be physical, measurable phenomena:

[S]ome aspects of mentality involve a realm of reality largely, but not completely, disconnected from the phenomena manifested in conventional physics. The idea of a disconnected realm does have precedents, for example in the way two of the fundamental forces (the strong and weak forces) play no role in large areas of physics and chemistry, whilst in other contexts they have a very important part to play. Next note that string theory, involving as it does spaces having more dimensions than the usual three...is consistent with there being such a ‘separate realm’....

But why should such a realm exist at all?....

[A] form of proto-life, defined as fluctuation patterns surviving longer than typical patterns do, can be hypothesised as occurring at the Planck scale, evolution of such life being expected to involve evolution of the accompanying informational systems also. We get to the proposed model by supposing that the ordinary physical component and the informational component can evolve separately. and that the informational component can even survive the creation and destruction of individual universes, remaining as an ever-present background with which new universes, Planck scale fluctuations and more developed life forms can all beneficially interact....

[W]e suppose that individual life forms can perturb the background state so as to create a localised ‘thought bubble’, tied to the individual concerned....

Assuming the validity of the scenario that has been described, the picture proposed can be adapted to account for the phenomena we set out to explain, namely telepathy or ESP....We assume, as would need to be assumed generally in the model, that the state of this bubble plays the role of information that is meaningful in the context and, by virtue of this, usable by the connected systems....

The problem any such analysis has to face is that of explaining how it is that, if such a mechanism for ESP or other paranormal processes exists, these processes manifest themselves only in very specific ways, and in ways that are not readily controllable....The right way to think about ESP is therefore to see it as a slowly developing phenomenon for a given individual, and one which may not develop at all if conditions are unfavourable. We see from this analysis that the frequently made counter-argument to the existence of ESP, that if it were possible it would have such a survival value that we would all evolve to be very good at it, is based on a misleading concept of what would be involved.

A related problem is the one raised by Weinberg (1993), who asks what possible physical signal could move distant objects and yet have no effect on scientific instruments? Such a question ignores the possibility that there might be a threshold for psychokinetic effects. A similar argument would lead one to be equally sceptical of claims that the heat of the sun can induce chemical reactions (i.e. burning) in a piece of paper, analogously something that happens only under special circumstances (e.g. using a magnifying glass to focus the sun’s rays on to a spot on the paper), the amount of burning under normal conditions being negligible.

All of which is very interesting, in a bizarre sort of way, but I'm not sure it posits any scientific (falsifiable) hypotheses.

If you have any thoughts on the subject, think hard. I'll try to pick them up.