This Is What Happens When Humanity Evolves – The Mind-Blowing Work of Roger D. Nelson
As head of the Global Consciousness Project (GCP), Roger D. Nelson brings his long life of research into the nature and effects of mass human consciousness to fruition, working at the international level through multiple laboratory locations. “We’re not isolated,” Nelson has said.
For the past two decades, Nelson and the GCP have brought together researchers into consciousness and associated phenomena. The goal is to gain a better understanding of the subtler ways in which mass consciousness responds to the world’s most significant, boundary-spanning events. Here’s what you need to know:
About the GCP
The GCP seeks to identify the properties of human mental and emotional interdependence. Nelson has drawn praise from other scholars for being one of the few scientific minds doing serious work on what the concept of global consciousness actually means for humanity and the world.
His body of work is devoted to the study of consciousness and intention, particularly the capacity of the human mind to act on, and in response to, the material world. Nelson’s work is noteworthy for its infusion of spiritual perspectives into hard science. He makes use of research studies specifically targeting “numinous” communal experiences.
All his research seems to quantify the core messages of the sacred wisdom teachings of traditional cultures. It shares an emphasis on the oneness of all humanity and the strong underlying connections we are able to create through focusing on compassion, creativity, and love.
About Nelson's Early Career
Roger D. Nelson earned his PhD from New York University. He focused on the field of experimental cognitive psychology, with particular emphasis on lesser-studied phenomena of perception.
He supplements this expertise with additional work in physics and statistics, as well as in multi-media production. A former president and board member of the Parapsychological Association, he believes that consciousness is “not confined to your skull,” but has a larger presence in the world that transcends the physical limitations of any single individual.
He spent more than 20 years at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab beginning in 1980. During this time, Nelson led projects focused on psi research and established the GCP from his Princeton offices. Since his retirement in 2002, he has continued to expand the scope and direction of the GCP as an entity connected to, but independent of, the university.
His deep immersion in a meshing of physics, human psychology, philosophy, and the creative arts continues to propel his research. He aims to expand the limits of what we currently understand about consciousness.
About Nelson's Work on the Effects of Group Consciousness
Nelson first built up years of laboratory-based work looking at how human mental intention affects sensitive engineering systems. As a precursor to the GCP, he started applying the capabilities of random event generator (often called “random number generator”) devices (abbreviated as “REG” or “RNG”) to investigate special group consciousness states.
Using devices he likened to “high-speed coin flippers,” Nelson would ask test subjects to focus on affecting which way the electronic “coins” flipped. Over the years he found, “with good statistical certainty,” that when people intended to change the actions of random systems, there was a notable change, albeit typically a small one.
He and his team began taking their REG devices out into the field. They went to ritual events, concerts, and other large gatherings capable of heightening emotion and energy. If the group achieved a notable coherence, the instruments’ readings again showed slight but notable changes.
About Nelson's Network of REGs
The largest group any researcher can imagine? Every person on earth. This led Nelson to station a network of dozens of REGs all over the world. Constantly running and picking up data, these REGs show that during times where large numbers of people engaged with one another around a central purpose, there is noticeable “patterning” beyond what would be expected were the instruments merely picking up random signals.
The purpose of this network is to pick up any evidence indicating activity on the part of Nelson’s hypothetical global consciousness in response to events both joyous (holiday celebrations, for example) and traumatic (such as the outbreak of war, or the terror attacks of 9/11). These REGs serve to transmit a continuous stream of information over the internet to Nelson’s receiver-server at Princeton. Today, he has amassed two decades of continuous data of this type.
In 2001, in the days immediately leading up to the terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Nelson’s REG system recorded notable changes before and after the attacks. He attributes this to coherent mass emotional responses on the part of humanity. Nelson likens his REG network to “an EEG for the whole world,” or an “electro-Gaia-gram,” in reference to James Lovelock’s famous “Gaia” hypothesis that the earth as a whole is more than the sum of its parts, and is, in effect, an order of living organism in itself.
About Conscious Evolution
Nelson’s work draws insights from information fields, quantum physics, and quantum “entanglement” theory—dismissed by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance”—to help explain observed reciprocal actions and anomalies associated with consciousness. The overall goal of Nelson's research is to demonstrate the interconnectedness of individual human consciousnesses and to help chart positive new directions for conscious evolution.
This idea originated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a mid-20th century Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and philosopher. Teilhard believed what he dubbed the “noosphere” was the next phase of humanity’s development. He defined the noosphere as a semi-biological “thinking membrane” covering the Earth and engaging with the consciousness of each individual.
About the Reception of Nelson’s Work in Academia
Traditional neuroscientific wisdom is as skeptical as Einstein, holding that thinking is the product of physical and chemical reactions, that therefore any type of mass consciousness is impossible, and that consciousness certainly has no ability to influence events in the physical world of matter and forces. In his 2019 book Connected: The Emergence of Global Consciousness, Nelson summarizes the ideas he hopes will change this mindset.
The November/December 2020 issue of Explore: The Journal of Science & Healing, includes an article by Larry Dossey. The physician and author of influential books that advocate for the power of mind and spirituality in medicine has called Nelson’s book “visionary” and “extraordinary” in its ability to rebut “morbid, ideological materialism.”
Nelson maintains that he finds the data supporting the hypothesis of human interconnectedness almost indisputable. In a 2019 interview, he echoed Teilhard in observing that humans are so “clever” that they have become almost too clever, building everything that occurs to them, but without paying attention to building the next steps in evolutionary consciousness.