Omnium Global Meditation

I received an email from Caroline, of the Omnium Foundation. She is a gifted teacher guiding individuals and groups to a better life through healing meditations and exercises:

We conduct very powerful global meditations through our regular internet webcasts and would like to know if you would be interested in analyzing the effects of this work. The participants experience various states of consciousness expansion and witness tremendous shifts each time individually and collectively. The links below contain sample webcasts we have conducted in the past. We are currently based in France but do regular work in the US as well. Let us know if you need any other details.

Warmest regards,

Caroline Cory
OMnium Foundation

I responded that we do occasionally look at web-organized meditations like this, but we know that the effects are so small relative to the noise background that they can only be seen by patiently repeating our experiment month after month and year after year. (See the caveat statement below.)

In any case, I did go ahead to do an analysis of the four meditations she listed that Omnium has done, as an event in our informal exploration series. I could not find any information about the length of the global meditations, so I chose one hour. The result shows considerable variation, but no trend. It would be nice to discover there is a big hit, but if so it is buried in the noise. The graph below shows the result.

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.