Divinity Atlas
Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists
have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which
expertise the answer needs.
These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows
only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where
the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the
hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither
one settles it alone.
You can send evidence on some of these. A pilot is open on 55 questions in one field, Palaeography. Each says what would resolve it; send something that meets that bar, with a source anybody can check, and an editor will weigh it. Sending evidence does not guarantee the question will be resolved, and it does not have to be your field to read what is being asked. See what is open.
Grouped by the part of the atlas the question sits in. Start here if you know the territory better than the technique.
Filter By Specialty 99 fields, 1 selected
Showing 3 of 608 questions, filtered to 1 specialty.
Metaphysics & Matter 3
Telepathy
Has the Maimonides dream telepathy protocol ever been repeated at a comparable scale using modern sleep laboratory methods?
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.
The Autoganzfeld Series
Does the ganzfeld effect survive a pre-registered multi-laboratory replication meeting the standard set in the 1986 Hyman-Honorton communique?
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.
Feeling the Future
Is the small positive effect reported in the 2015 meta-analysis of ninety retroactive-influence experiments explicable entirely by publication bias and analytic flexibility?
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.