Roger Nelson - Science, Consciousness, and the Search for Reality

Consciousness researcher and experimental psychologist Roger Nelson describes himself as 100% skeptical and 100% open-minded. He is the director of the Global Consciousness Project, a collaboration that maintains a network of random-event generators (REGs) in laboratories around the world. These devices are designed to produce a statistically random stream of ones and zeros. Watching this data over time has revealed that in the wake of world events that generate widespread response in the human population, the random data suddenly becomes distinctly ordered, as if the unintended effect of human psychic energy is directly affecting the machinery itself.

In this conversation with EnlightenNext's Craig Hamilton, Nelson describes this and other fascinating research undertaken in the quest to make the imperceptible realm of human consciousness a visible, viable, scientific reality. In his own words, "What I hope is that this [work] can be one of the many small but important influences to teach people, to allow people to understand their interactive nature, their interdependence, and their potential and responsibility for evolving toward the next stage of humanity.”

BIO

Roger Nelson is the founder and director of the IONS-sponsored Global Consciousness Project (GCP), an international collaboration of scientists, artists, and citizens interested in the extraordinary aspects of human consciousness. From 1980 to 2002, Nelson served as the coordinator of experimental work in the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab at Princeton University. The PEAR lab develops technologies and experimental applications to study direct manifestations of consciousness and intention. The implications of the research are that consciousness plays a subtle but important and constructive role in the physical world.

Nelson's professional degrees are in experimental cognitive psychology, with a special focus on the lesser known aspects of perception. His primary work in design and analysis is supplemented by a background in physics, statistical methods, and multimedia production. He is a student of "alternate psychologies," which represent a wide range of transpersonal and non-Western approaches to the understanding of consciousness. He feels that an inclusive and multidisciplinary approach combining scientific, aesthetic, and spiritual perspectives is essential if we are to come to terms with consciousness as it exists and operates in the physical world.

Nelson has been a member since 1993 of the Esalen Institute's Center for Theory and Research working groups on Healing Interactions and Subtle Energies. He was a participant in the formative meetings for the Office of Alternative Medicine (now NCCAM) of the NIH and contributed "Meditation and Medicine" to the published report of the NIH Mind/Body working group. He serves on the Advisory Board of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, and is a councilor for the Society of Scientific Exploration.

Dr. Nelson established the Global Consciousness Project in 1998, expanding the concepts of consciousness field research to global dimensions. The GCP's researchers have created a world-spanning network of detectors to record effects of major "global events" on a hypothesized global consciousness. The goal of the project is to capture indications of the first glimmerings of a "noosphere" of intelligence for the globe, in the sense of Teilhard de Chardin's vision of human evolution and purpose.