10.11.11 New Reality Meditation

Yet another web-based gathering to meditate on a brighter future has set up a website and facebook pages that have gathered lots of attention. The invitation is to meditate for 11 minutes on 11 days beginning November 11 2010, at the same hour -- 11 pm Eastern Time. (They suggest alternatives for those who can't do that time.) Here is their Facebook description:

The New Reality Group is merely a group of friends who are physicists and mathematicians that believe our very own consciousness defines our reality. But it's not important who we are - just think of us as the people trying to organize a group effort for change and we're happy to have your participation. Change your thoughts, change your world!

Their website is New Reality Transmission. It uses heavy graphic/flash technology so is slow to load, but does a nice job of transmitting their message and invitation.

The GCP event was set as a concatenation of one hour on each of the 11 days of the meditation, beginning at the default time each day. (We use an hour because analysis suggests the GCP effects require substantial time to develop.) The result is Chisquare 40134.251 on 39600 df, for p = 0.029 and Z = 1.892.

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.