Open Questions

Open Ayahuasca Vine

Why It Is Open Two unrelated plants, out of the tens of thousands in the Amazon, must be combined for either to have any effect, and nothing about the appearance, taste or separate action of either suggests the other. Explanations range from very long systematic experimentation to the answer the traditions give, which is that the plants communicated it. The record is oral and the practice is old.

What Would Settle It Probably nothing can settle it. What would help is comparative work on how many other plant pairings are known in Amazonian practice, since a tradition with many such combinations implies a method, while a single one implies an accident or a transmission.

Expertise Needed Ethnobotany, Amazonian anthropology, ethnopharmacology

Question posed in Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, Luis Eduardo Luna.

Open Salvia Divinorum

Why It Is Open The plant has no confirmed wild population, sets seed poorly and is propagated from cuttings, which points to long cultivation, as with kava and Brugmansia. But there is no colonial record of it, unlike the mushrooms and ololiuqui which the friars documented extensively, and no archaeological evidence. So the plant looks ancient and the documentation begins in the twentieth century.

What Would Settle It Discovery of a wild population would settle the origin. A colonial or pre-conquest reference, possibly under a name not yet connected to it, would settle the antiquity. Genetic work on cultivated clones could estimate how long it has been propagated vegetatively.

Expertise Needed Ethnobotany, plant genetics, Mesoamerican ethnohistory

Question posed in Ethnopharmacology of Ska Maria Pastora (Salvia divinorum, Epling and Jativa-M.), Leander J. Valdes III, Jose Luis Diaz and Ara G. Paul.

Open Blue Lotus

Why It Is Open The iconographic case, argued by Emboden, is substantial: the flower is held to the nose with unusual persistence in banquet scenes, some figures appear to be in altered states, and it is linked to wine and to the drinking festivals of Hathor. The pharmacological case is weak. Apomorphine and nuciferine are present in small amounts, apomorphine is a strong emetic rather than a pleasant intoxicant, and no psychoactive dose has been shown achievable from a quantity of flowers a person would plausibly use.

What Would Settle It Quantitative analysis of alkaloid content in Nymphaea caerulea grown under conditions comparable to ancient Egypt, plus a controlled account of the effect of a realistic dose. Residue analysis of vessels from banquet or funerary contexts would help. Note that ololiuqui was doubted on similar grounds for centuries and then vindicated, so an absence of demonstrated activity is not evidence of absence.

Expertise Needed Egyptology, ethnobotany, phytochemistry

Question posed in Transcultural Use of Narcotic Water Lilies in Ancient Egyptian and Maya Drug Ritual, William A. Emboden.

Open Telepathy

Why It Is Open The original series reported dream content correlating with a sender's target image above chance, but no other laboratory reproduced the effect, and the series itself was never repeated at a comparable scale. Irvin Child argued in 1985 that the result was dismissed rather than evaluated, which is a claim about how the field responded rather than a claim that anyone has since run the missing replication.

What Would Settle It A preregistered, multi-night sleep laboratory replication with automated target selection, blind judging of dream transcripts against a randomized image pool, and a sample size and analysis plan fixed in advance.

Expertise Needed Sleep research; experimental psychology; meta-analytic methodology

Question posed in Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal Extrasensory Perception, Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner and Alan Vaughan.

Open The Autoganzfeld Series

Why It Is Open Hyman and Honorton wrote down, jointly and in advance, what a decisive ganzfeld study would look like. No series run since has been accepted by both sides as meeting it. Two later meta-analyses, Milton and Wiseman in 1999 and Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio in 2010, reach opposite conclusions on differently defined study pools, so the accumulated literature cannot settle it either.

What Would Settle It A pre-registered adversarial collaboration with laboratories on both sides of the dispute, an analysis plan agreed and lodged before data collection, and a commitment from all parties to publish whatever results.

Expertise Needed Experimental psychology; meta-analysis; pre-registration methodology

Question posed in A Joint Communique: The Psi Ganzfeld Controversy, Ray Hyman, Charles Honorton.

Open Feeling the Future

Why It Is Open Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron and Duggan report a small overall effect across ninety experiments and argue that bias-correction methods do not remove it. Critics answer that the correction methods available cannot distinguish a genuine small effect from a literature filtered by what got written up, particularly where many of the constituent studies were not pre-registered. The dispute is about the adequacy of the statistical tools, and it is live in the wider methodology literature and not only in parapsychology.

What Would Settle It A registered-report replication series of adequate power, with the analysis plan lodged in advance and a commitment to publish, run by laboratories on both sides.

Expertise Needed Meta-analytic methodology; statistics; experimental psychology

Question posed in Feeling the Future: A Meta-Analysis of 90 Experiments on the Anomalous Anticipation of Random Future Events, Daryl J. Bem, Patrizio Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron and Michael Duggan.

Open The Persinger God Helmet Experiments

Why It Is Open The founding series reported the effect and a double-blind replication at Uppsala in 2005 did not, finding that measured suggestibility predicted the reported experience while exposure to the field did not. Persinger held that the Swedish exposure protocol differed materially from his own. Neither side withdrew, no further trial has been run under a protocol both would accept, and the God helmet continues to be cited in popular accounts of the neuroscience of religion as though the matter were settled in one direction or the other.

What Would Settle It A pre-registered, multi-site, double-blind trial using the field parameters and exposure durations of the original series, with suggestibility measured and entered as a covariate rather than offered as a rival explanation after the fact, and with the analysis plan fixed before data collection.

Expertise Needed Experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, working with the psychology of religion

Question posed in Sensed Presence and Mystical Experiences Are Predicted by Suggestibility, Not by the Application of Transcranial Weak Complex Magnetic Fields, Pehr Granqvist, Mats Fredrikson, Patrik Unge, Andrea Hagenfeldt, Sven Valind, Dan Larhammar and Marcus Larsson.

Open Chen

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Yax

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Sak

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Keh

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Chen

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Yax

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Sak

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Keh

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Second Sight

Why It Is Open The entire evidentiary record for second sight is testimonial, collected by folklorists across three centuries of Highland tradition. No experimental or quasi-experimental protocol comparing a claimed seer's forewarnings to ordinary hit or miss chance has ever been devised, so there is no data from which any verdict could be drawn either way.

What Would Settle It A prospective, blinded elicitation study: predictions attributed to second sight logged in advance, scored against subsequent events by an independent judge, and compared to a stated chance baseline.

Expertise Needed Folklore studies; parapsychology; statistics

Question posed in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Robert Kirk.

Open Apparitions and Crisis Apparitions

Why It Is Open The 1889-1894 Census of Hallucinations argued that apparitions coinciding with a real death occurred more often than chance, but the finding rests entirely on retrospective self report gathered by volunteers approaching people they knew, against a chance baseline its own authors had to construct. No prospective, controlled test of crisis apparitions has been conducted since.

What Would Settle It A prospectively registered study defining in advance what counts as a qualifying apparition and a chance baseline independent of the reporting population, run forward in time rather than reconstructed from memory.

Expertise Needed Statistics; survey methodology; history of psychical research

Question posed in Report on the Census of Hallucinations, Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Alice Johnson.

Open The Global Consciousness Project

Why It Is Open The network and its archive are not in dispute, but three analytic decisions are made by people with access to the data: which events count as globally attended, where each analysis window begins and ends, and which statistic to compute. The central criticism is that this freedom is sufficient to generate the reported result from structureless data, and it cannot be tested from the published analyses alone.

What Would Settle It An outside party defining a list of events and window boundaries in advance, lodging it, and the project running the analysis once against that list without modification.

Expertise Needed Statistics; pre-registration methodology

Question posed in The Global Consciousness Project, Roger D. Nelson (Global Consciousness Project).

Open Feeling the Future

Why It Is Open Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron and Duggan report a small overall effect across ninety experiments and argue that bias-correction methods do not remove it. Critics answer that the correction methods available cannot distinguish a genuine small effect from a literature filtered by what got written up, particularly where many of the constituent studies were not pre-registered. The dispute is about the adequacy of the statistical tools, and it is live in the wider methodology literature and not only in parapsychology.

What Would Settle It A registered-report replication series of adequate power, with the analysis plan lodged in advance and a commitment to publish, run by laboratories on both sides.

Expertise Needed Meta-analytic methodology; statistics; experimental psychology

Question posed in Feeling the Future: A Meta-Analysis of 90 Experiments on the Anomalous Anticipation of Random Future Events, Daryl J. Bem, Patrizio Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron and Michael Duggan.

Open Theban J J

Why It Is Open J was not a separate letter of the Latin alphabet Trithemius was ciphering in 1518, and the earliest Theban sets carry no sign for it: the sign for I served for both. The Theban J in circulation today is a later supplement, usually described as adapted from the I, but nobody has identified the chart or edition in which it first appears, or the hand that made it. The modern twenty six letter Theban set therefore contains one letter with no traceable origin at all.

What Would Settle It A bibliographic collation of printed Theban charts in sequence, from Polygraphiae in 1518 and Agrippa's De occulta philosophia in 1533, through the eighteenth and nineteenth century grimoire reprints, to the twentieth century witchcraft revival, to locate the earliest surviving witness of the supplementary sign and to name the edition that introduced it.

Expertise Needed History of the printed book, analytical bibliography of occult literature

Question posed in Theban alphabet (reference article), Wikipedia contributors, Section on letters: the modern characters J and U are not represented and are often transliterated using the Theban characters for I and V..