Coherent Consciousness and Reduced Randomness: Correlations on September 11, 2001

The 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 over 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 nonrandom 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. Two formal analyses were made, testing hypotheses based on standardized procedures for making predictions and performing a statistical evaluation. A number of post hoc and exploratory studies, including work by five independent analysts, provide additional perspective and examine the context of several days before and after the major events. The results show that a substantial increase in structure was correlated with the most intense and widely shared periods of emotional reactions to the events. Further analysis indicates that the non-random behavior cannot be attributed to ordinary sources such as electrical disturbances or high levels of mobile phone use. The evidence suggests that the anomalous structure is somehow related to the unusually coherent focus of human attention on these extraordinary events.