Roger Nelson

ROGER NELSON

Roger Nelson, Ph.D., is an experimental psychologist with a special interest in the lesser known aspects of perception and cognition. During the 1970's he was a professor at a small college in Vermont, who typically said yes when good students wanted to do experiments in parapsychology. A series of coincidences led him to Princeton University in 1980, where he coordinated research at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab until he retired in 2002. In 1997 he founded the Global Consciousness Project (GCP) which he continues to direct. Nelson's broad interests in psychology, physics, philosophy, and the arts have generated many opportunities to collaborate with creative people, including the interdisciplinary teams at PEAR and the GCP, developing technologies and experimental applications to study consciousness, intention, remote perception, and mind-matter interactions both in the laboratory and in natural situations.

At the PEAR lab, Nelson managed the development of a variety of intention-based experiments, making good use of Princeton's extraordinary facilities. The University's school of engineering was at the center of advances in electronic and computer technology, ensuring that the PEAR experiments were at the cutting edge. By 1993, Nelson was using random number generators (RNG) in the field to register correlations of data with special states of group consciousness even in the absence of intentions. A few years later, this work led naturally to the GCP, which exploits the same RNG technology as the lab and field experiments, but in a world-spanning instrument designed to monitor the effects of globally shared emotions or states of consciousness. Like many scientists working at the edges of what we know, Nelson is conservative, demanding high quality science that embodies both skepticism and an open mind. Based on a decade of increasingly persuasive evidence from the GCP analyses, he has shifted focus toward public presentations about the research and its implications.

For links to more information and lists of publication, please go to the GCP website at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ or http://www.global-mind.org, and in particular, http://noosphere.princeton.edu/media.html. A link to a more formal bibliography is forthcoming.