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?

• Does the increase in neuroplasticity caused by SSRI use make the brain more-responsive to changes due to sex-hormones, such as during cross-sex HRT?

  • Are SSRI-takers more-likely to experience a change in sexuality during cross-sex HRT than non-SSRI-takers?

• Do early puberties cause a critical maturity period to end early, thus resulting in reduced maturity in adulthood?

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?

• 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 already 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?

• Do FtMs improve at mental spatial rotation? Do MtFs get worse at it? ie: Is proficiency in mental spatial rotation actively contingent on androgens?

  • Regardless of whether a T-dominant hormonality is superior to an E-dominant one for this metric, is a E-dominant hormonality better at spatial rotation than a null case? (ie, eunuchs, postmenopausal women, chemically castrated individuals, etc)

• I think there's a possibility that some people are neural sex-hormone responders in adulthood, and some are not. The former group, when put on cross-sex hormones in adulthood, experiences substantially more neural feminization/masculinization and often experiences a change to their sexuality; the other group does not. And some people fall in the middle.

• Several hypotheses related to FtM androphonia and VFS:

  • Hypothesis 1: FtMs who drop voices very rapidly after starting T are more-likely to sustain voice damage.
  • Hypothesis 2: FtMs who start transition after their voice finishes maturing (their early 20s) are more-likely to sustain voice damage.
  • Hypothesis 3: FtMtFs with this kind of "atypical" androphonia may not benefit as much from standard voice surgeries as FtMtFs with typical male androphonia, on account of the damage.
  • Hypothesis 4: The FtMs with pain and other such issues are the ones with damaged voices, while the others are probably more in-line with normal male androphonia.

• How representative is DNA retrieved from the mouth of the germline DNA? Somatic mutations are pretty common, and the mouth is exposed to a lot of viruses (including DNA-based ones, which rarely integrate into their host cells). Shouldn't any good DNA test take samples from different parts of the body, and use something like the Comparative Method to reconstruct the person's birth genome?

• How common is it to be given genetic counselling based on somatic mutations in the mouth that are not present elsewhere in the body? Example: Having genes contributing to a high risk of prostate cancer in mouth cells, but not in the actual prostate cells themselves. What about the reverse? (somatic mutation "curing" a genetic disorder in mouth cells but not in the cells where that disorder is relevant, thus masking it from tests)

  • At what age do these possibilities reach a point where they become concerning?

• Do human males have a month-long libido cycle that can sync up with their female partner's cycle?

• Do scars in childhood heal somewhat, where scars in adulthood do not?

• It is known that ASD and TS often come with gastrointestinal issues. It is often assumed that these neurological conditions cause the gastrointestinal issues; but what if the arrow of causality actually points the other way, and early childhood microbiome imbalances (including in the gut) cause the autoimmune responses theorized to underpin many instances of ASD and TS? If this is so, then the increasing sterility of the modern world may be directly causing the observed increases in ASD.

• Perhaps air fresheners can harm one's sense of smell in the same way that white noise can harm one's sense of hearing?: By providing chronic stimulation without reprieve.

• Maybe the reason people get pituitary sand as they age is widespread chronically suboptimal vitamin K2 consumption?

Nutrition

• Does added selenium bind methylmercury in fish as well as selenium 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?