AN EIGHT-day Internet Peace Experiment, which was aimed at seeing if positive thought directed at a conflict area by a large number of people at the same time could influence events, says violence appeared to drop dramatically four weeks later.
The experiment lasted for eight days, from September 14 to 21, and chose to focus on the North region of Sri Lanka, “where a brutal civil war has been ongoing for decades”, said a statement from the Paphos-based Psychognosia, which took part in the event.
The experiment was tracked and studied by the team of scientists at the Global Consciousness Project (GCP), which is run out of Princeton.
The Princeton-based project, which has been going on for many years, seems to indicate that when the world’s population is engaged in focusing on a positive or negative global event, it can affect randomly generated computer numbers at 100 stations or “listening posts” around the world. One of these generators is actually in Cyprus, which joined the network in April 2004, and is run by Psychognosia. The station is based at Coral Bay.
Psychognosia said data on deaths and injuries in the conflict area were tracked for at least three months beforehand and for one month after the experiment ended, at which point scientists analysed the GCP data.
“Some interesting trends emerged,” said the announcement.
It said GCP looked at data from the international network for the period during the 10 minute meditation with 15 minutes on either side, a total of 40 minutes each day for the eight days of the experiment.
“Ironically, there was a sudden surge of attacks, killings and increasing violence. During the experiment, violence levels in the North escalated dramatically right at the start of the eight days of intentions and then began to drop off dramatically later that week,” it said.
“This coincided with a downward trend monitored on the GCP network of listening posts. Interestingly, in the immediate aftermath of the experiment, both deaths and numbers of people injured fell dramatically.”
It said four weeks after the experiment, violence levels continued to drop, even to below levels from the 12 weeks before the Peace Intention Experiment began.
“So, in a few words just what does all this mean? Two intriguing results, both concerning events that are positive attempts by humans to create a more just, compassionate and less violent world,” the statement said.
“At Psychognosia, we feel that this leading-edge scientific research project continues to track something here that we’re not quite sure what it is. But the overall results of their statistical analysis of events during the past decade indicate the odds against chance are more than a million to one. We think those odds are pretty impressive and we plan to keep our Cyprus ‘egg’ ticking over and reporting constantly to the centre in Princeton.”
