Academic Conjectures

This is a list of what I feel (or at least felt at the time) to be interesting novel questions for Science. Most (or all) of these are questions I cannot, myself, answer; accordingly, I have recorded them here so that others might be inspired to research what I cannot.

Psychology

• Is a person's brain (and gut), when started on SSRIs in childhood and discontinuing after the age of 25, wired with the expectation of having extra serotonin, such that discontinuing the SSRI will lead to an actual chemical imbalance in the brain where one did not exist beforehand and would not have existed without SSRI therapy?

  • Would one-shot "heroic dose" psychedelic therapy be capable of correcting or at least lessening this?

• Can psychedelic use trigger permanent changes in sober synæsthesia? ie, gaining it, losing it, strengthening it, changing it, etc.

• Are changes in seasonal affect (caused by differing exposure to sunlight) drivers of success relative to a situation where light is steady year-round? (ie, does the rubber-banding of Winter vs Summer drive success in a way that constancy does not?)

  • If so, if it's true at the individual level, is it true at the societal level as well?

Biology

• Is persistent bruxism in part a symptom of not eating enough hard foods, like how overbites are that such a thing, or like how nervous movements increase in the absense of exercise?

• Is bruxism at least partially suppressed by exercise? (We know that other nervous movements are suppressed by exercise, so I'm wondering if bruxism is, too.)

• Was /φ/ more common than /f/ before we stopped eating hard foods and acquired overbites?

  • Was it the dominant phoneneme in older versions of Latin, Greek, and Germanic?
  • Is it dominant in modern hunter-gatherers? Or is their diet also sufficiently soft to where they also have overbites?

• How do frugivorous primates metabolize fructose? Surely they must do so more healthily than do humans?

• Are there any humans that aren't fructose-intolerant?

• If dogs can get ADHD, can we treat it with cocoa? (It's a stimulant, if ya didn't know.)

• Since new memories often replace old memories, does the modern practice of intense education make childhood memories harder to access than they would have been without that education?

• Can the male drive for femininity be fulfilled/subverted by male-to-female transition, and does this have explanatory power for the current uptick in incidence beyond what can be explained?

• Were bans on clerical marriage in various religions sufficient pressure to select against religiosity in the gene pool in the pre-modern era?

• How much of the sudden rise in certain mental health issues in industrial societies (like the West) results from geriatric pregnancies and their higher birth defect rates?

• Totally random, but do people subconsciously tend to guess the length of a second as being around the time between their heart beats?

• Are long, narrow noses optimized for cold or dry air, and wide, flat noses optimized for hot or humid air?

Nutrition

• Does added solanine bind methylmercury in fish as well as solanine in fish binds it? If so, then couldn't we just cook fish with mushrooms to reduce the risk of mercury damage in humans?

History

• Did Victorian attitudes toward masturbation develop by analogy with attitudes toward sex that developed in the wake of syphillus?