You've heard of deja vu, right?

>Yeah, like you sorta remember this happening before.
Yeah, or maybe you sorta remember something that will happen.

Okay, here's something interesting: You have a computer generate numbers, either +1 or -1, with equal probability. Then you have the computer display the cumulative sum of these numbers. Since you'd expect to get equal numbers of +1 and -1 (roughly), this sum should be 0 (roughly). Such a display might look like Figure 1. Very nearly a horizontal line. That's to be expected ... so you go for a coffee.

Figure 1

Then, when you return, you look at the computer screen and you see Figure 2. What's happening? >A busted PC. Okay, fair enough. But now suppose that a few hours later two planes crash into the World Trade Center in New York. >Yeah, right. The PC has deja vu.

Figure 2

Okay, it's a few years later and, after a long period of calm displays, you get something like Figure 2, again.

>C'mon. This is a joke, right?
A while later a tsunami hits Asia and over 150,000 people die.

It's September 6, 1997 and your display has been acting normally ... a nearly horizontal line.
Then it goes crazy ... again.
In fact, hundreds of computers around the world have similar programs running ... and they all went crazy!

>What's significant about September 6, 1997?
That was the day that a billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey.

Do you know the word "Gaia"?

>Hey, I love that stuff ... with ketchup and fries!
It's the name of the Greek Earth Goddess and there's a Gaia Theory which suggests that it's not the amicable atmosphere of the earth that enabled the evolution of life, but that life itself influenced the atmosphere in order to create an environment to its liking.

>Huh?
If true, it suggests that life, a global consciousness, a coagulation of thoughts, ideas and life energy ... that these may have more power to affect events than we might suppose. Indeed, the Gaia Hypothesis proposes that our planet functions as a single organism that maintains conditions necessary for its survival. The Earth is a single living entity with the capacity of self regulation.

>To predict the future? To influence that random number generator? You're kidding, right?
Suppose it were true. Then we'd like to have a kind of electroencephalogram to measure the global consciousness.
Let's call it an ElectroGAIAgram or, as the Global Consciousness Project calls it, an EGG.
When it began, in the late 1990s, they claimed to have hatched an EGG  

P.S. Here's their 9/11 chart (but see others at the link at the bottom):

>It's going crazy DOWN, not up.
You think that's important?
>And it looks like it's going crazy after the event.
I think that's important!
>So where did you get that stuff about: "... a few hours after 9/11"?
Here ... and I always believe what's on the Internet.

>So does this stuff go crazy up, or down?
Here's an interesting story:

Barry Fenn was one of the investigators, in Australia (or New Zealand?).
He and a close friend had EGGS to record any deviations from the normal, random sequence.
On May 22, 2000, after a long illness, Barry Fenn died.
The deviations from what would be regarded as "normal" (for these two EGGS) went like this:

>Looks like a prediction ... and you believe this stuff, right?
I always believe what's on the Internet. Besides, they didn't find any dead animals in that Asian tsunami. Did they know it was coming? Do they have a greater sense of ... uh, animal intuition?

>And you have a theory, right?
Of course!  

Here our preamble:

• It's an accepted fact that a living organism communicates with itself through electrical signals; bioelectricity.
• In China it's called the body's Qi field.
• Sharks can detect other fish via their electrical signals.
• Some think that acupuncture causes changes in the electrical flow by intercepting at certain "nodes".
• Electricity, in the form of electric fields, plays a vital role in numerous biological processes from embryonic development to cell division, nerve regeneration and wound repair.
• Some say there's an aura of electrical energy about a human body that can be detected.
• So-called "quacks" use magical machines to detect and correct this aura. Who knows? Maybe they actually work ... sometimes.

>And do you have a theory?
Okay, here's the theory:

The electromagnetic energy about an living organism is small, almost undetectable.
If there are jillions of individuals each experiencing the same anxiety and radiating, the effect may be large enough to affect a computer.

>Why synchronized?

• It's a kind of resonance. Imagine several people pushing a child on a swing, each pusher working independently ... disorganized.
  Now imagine they all work as an organized whole, pushing together.
• Consider, too, a flashlight. You get a beam of light with a jillion frequencies.
• In a laser, the light is monochromatic; a single frequency.
• With a flashlight, the waves of light emerging are randomly generated.
• In a laser they're coherent, or in-phase. The light in a laser comes from gas atoms that absorb energy, electrons move to an orbit associated with a higher energy, the electrons fall back to their "normal" orbit and release a photon of light ... and these photons are all identical!
• It's like water waves: they can collide and cancel each other, or they can be in-phase, organized, in step with each other ... and generate an amplified wave.

>Are we still talking about deja vu?
We're talking about a global, coherent, synchronous Qi field.

>And the computer gets busted.
No, it just makes mistakes. If "normal" operation is to generate a running sum which remains close to 0, then "abnormal" operation would presumably be to generate a sum which deviates dramatically from 0.

>What about predicting the future?
I'm not aware of any evidence of that. As far as I can tell, the EGGs responded to 9/11 after the event.
People were anxious. Lots of people. All over this small planet.

Although the Barry Fenn chart seems to predict his death, Fenn was ill with cancer for months.

>What's this theory called?
The g-effect, where g stands for gaia.

>Or gummy. Anyway, do you actually believe this theory?
Of course!

>Well I think it's like that crazy anti-graviton theory that explains the Hutchison Effect.
I like that theory, too.

See Skeptic Report and EGG display and 9/11.