Up until now, The Intention Experiment has run experiments to effect the growth of water and the quality of water. On September 14, the project will run its first ‘Peace Intention Experiment, to see if group intention can lower violence in a particular targeted city.

On September 14 the Intention Experiment will run the first pilot study to test whether many people around the world sending an intention for peace in a particular ‘hot spot’ will lower the level of violence. As outrageous as this project may seem, there is a reasonable amount of evidence to suggest that a collective consciousness might possibly exist and that there may be power in numbers.

In the famous random-event generator experiments carried out by the PEAR project at Princeton University, Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne found that the influence of pairs of the opposite sex who knew each other had a powerful complementary effect on the machines – roughly three and a half times that of individuals. Two intensively involved people appeared to create six times the ‘order’ on a random machine. Some couples even produced a ‘signature’ result, which did not resemble the effects they generated individually.

There is also evidence that a group all intently focused on the same thought registered as a large effect on REG machines. Roger Nelson, the chief coordinator of the PEAR lab, had come up with the idea of running REG machines continuously during a particularly engaging event, to examine whether the focused attention of a group had any effect on the random output of the machines.

He and the noted psychologist Dean Radin developed what they termed ‘FieldREG’ devices and ran them during a host of events involving the highly focused attention of an audience: intense or euphoric group workshops; religious group rituals; Wagnerian festivals; theatrical presentations; even the Academy Awards. In most instances, their studies showed that multiple minds holding the same intensely felt thought created some kind of deviation from the norm on the equipment.

In 1997, Nelson decided to place REGs all over the world, have them run continuously and compare their output with moments of global events with the greatest emotional impact. For his programme, which became known as the Global Consciousness Project, Nelson organized a centralized computer program, so that REGs located in 50 places around the globe could pour their continuous stream of random bits of data into one vast central hub through the Internet. Periodically, Nelson and his colleagues studied these outpourings and compared them with the biggest breaking news stories, attempting to rout out any sort of statistical connection. Standardized methods and analysis revealed any demonstration of order – a moment when the machine output displayed less randomness than usual – and whether the time that it had been generated corresponded with that of a major world event.

By 2006, they had studied 205 top news events, including the death of the Princess of Wales, the millennium celebrations, the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr, and his wife, and the attempted Clinton impeachment. When Nelson analyzed four years’ worth of data, a pattern emerged. When people reacted with great joy or horror to a major event, the machines seemed to react as well. Furthermore, the degree of ‘order’ in the machine’s output seemed to match the emotional intensity of the event, particularly those that had been tragic: the greater the horror, the greater the order.

This trend appeared most notable during the events of 9/11. After the twin towers were destroyed, Nelson, Radin, and several colleagues studied the data that had poured in from 37 REGs around the world. According to the results of four individual analyses, the effect on the machines during the plane crashes was unprecedented. Out of any moment in 2001, the greatest variance in the machines away from randomness took place that day. The results also represented the largest daily average correlation in output between each machine than at any other time in the history of the project. According to the REGs, the world’s mind had reacted with a coherent global horror.

Nelson went on to study other events in the wake of 9/11, including the start of the Iraqi war. He compared REG activity with variations in the approval polls of President George W. Bush, to see if he could discover a connection of any kind between the global ‘mind’ and current American opinions of the president, and whether the REG network reacted most when there were strong feelings of unity and purpose, as the Americans had shared in the wake of 9/11, or when the public mood was polarized, as it had been after the invasion of Iraq and the deposing of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Peaks in variations followed big public changes of opinion of any variety, either for or against the president. Strong emotion, positive or negative – even to presidential decisions – seemed to produce order.

The results of the FieldREG work and the Global Consciousness Project offer several important clues about the nature of group intention. A group mind appears to have a psychokinetic effect on any random microphysical process, even when not focused on the machinery itself. The energy from a collective, intensely felt thought appears to be infectious. There also appears to be a ‘dose’ effect; the effect on an REG of a load of people thinking the same thought is larger than the effect of a single person. Finally, emotional content or degree of focus is important. The thought has to engulf a group of people in a moment of peak attention, so that every member of the group is thinking the same thought at the same time. A catastrophe is certainly an effective way to snap the mind to attention.

Besides the Global Consciousness Project, the only other group to study the effect of group mind on violence is the Transcendental Meditation studies, demonstrating that when a certain number of people are meditating in a particular city, the crime rate goes down (see Bleeping Herald July 2008).

The Global Consciousness Project and the TM studies have one serious limitation. Both refer to the effect of mass attention. There was been no intention to cause change. I am interested in what will happen if a number of people are not simply attending to something but also trying to affect it in some way. If the focused attention of a group has a physical impact on sensitive equipment, does the signal get stronger when the group is actually trying to change something?

Nelson’s work with FieldREGs suggests that the size of the group is not as important as the intensity of focus; any group, however small, exerted an effect so long as the parties were involved in rapturous attention. But how many people does group need to exert an effect? How intently focused do we need to be? What are the true limits of our influence – if any? After September 14, we will begin to find our own answers.

To join the Peace Intention Experiment, register at www.theintentionexperiment.com/peace. Lynne McTaggart is also running workshops in the U. S. called Living with Intention to teach people how to use intention to heal their lives and others.  For more information or to book your place, click here.

Lynne McTaggart, author of The Field and The Intention Experiment, is holding a series of special Living with Intention workshops in California, Portland and Boston to teach people how to use intention to heal their lives and others. For more information or to book your place, click here.