Hi everyone.
I’ve been exploring the Voynich Manuscript from a multi-disciplinary perspective, working together with an AI assistant and reviewing a wide range of publicly available studies, technical reports, and linguistic/paleographic references.
This isn’t a bold claim or a “solution.”
It’s simply a hypothesis that appears internally consistent across several domains, and I’m hoping to get feedback from people with actual expertise.
🔍 The idea (a hypothesis, not a conclusion)
The Voynich Manuscript may reflect:
code-mixing, fluctuating handwriting stability, and visuospatial distortion produced by a real 15th-century scribe experiencing cognitive impairment
(e.g., post-TBI effects, aphasia, or age-related decline).
This thought came from comparing:
- existing material analyses
- handwriting irregularities
- linguistic drift between Latin, Middle High German, and regional dialect forms
- patterns known in modern neuropsychology (perseveration, writing noise, variable clarity)
I’m not arguing this is proven — only that it seems coherent enough to examine further, and I’d like help assessing whether it holds up under expert scrutiny.
📘 Why this direction seemed worth exploring
Across many folios, there appear to be two contrasting modes:
• More stable pages
(botanical folios, organized calendars, consistent line flow)
• Less stable pages
(repetition loops, drifting letterforms, collapsing spatial planning, tremor-like noise)
These variations reminded me of cognitive fluctuation patterns described in clinical literature.
This led to the question:
“Could some inconsistencies be natural cognitive variation rather than intentional encoding?”
Not a claim — just a possibility.
🧪 Why I’m posting in r/UnsolvedMysteries
I don’t have formal training in any of the relevant fields.
To evaluate this idea responsibly, I need guidance about:
- whether the hypothesis is plausible,
- where it fails, and
- what kind of expertise is necessary to test it.
Specifically, input from:
- neuropsychology / dysgraphia
- historical linguistics (Latin, Middle High German, dialects)
- codicology / paleography
- medieval medicine and monastic practices
- statistical analysis of natural vs. impaired writing
- historical botany
Even small comments from specialists would help me avoid misinterpretations.
📂 What I have so far
I’ve organized notes, comparisons, and citations into an OSF project.
It’s not a polished paper — just a structured collection of observations based on publicly available research, combined with AI-assisted cross-checking to ensure internal consistency.
If anyone is willing to point out flaws or suggest relevant literature, I’d be grateful.
🙏 What I’m NOT claiming
Just to be completely clear:
- ❌ Not a decipherment
- ❌ Not “solved”
- ❌ Not a diagnosis asserted as fact
- ❌ Not contradicting existing material analyses (I rely entirely on them)
Instead, I’m asking:
“Is a cognitively impaired scribe model reasonable enough to investigate further — or is there a clear reason it can’t be correct?”
Either answer would be valuable.
Thanks for reading.
Happy to discuss or provide OSF links.
I read up to "AI assistant" and noped out of here.
You couldn't even write the post without the help of AI, what makes you think you can do any extensive research and fact check whatever ChatGPT hallucinates?
[deleted]
Fuck off with your ChatGPT nonsense
I would think a level of cognitive impairment could explain a few of the oddities, like the handwriting changes and language fluctuation. However, there would have to something more involved to explain what all of the charts mean and the botanical guide, which to my knowledge don’t represent actual plants known to us, as far as we can decipher. The language, while meaning with influences, also isn’t just a mash up of these languages, correct? But seems like it’s a created language that took influence from these. So whether the writer was attempting to encode something or had say schizophrenia and was creating something new, cognitive impairment wouldn’t explain everything imo.
Thanks — that’s a very good point, and I agree that cognitive instability alone doesn’t explain all the oddities in the botanical section.
One thing I’m exploring is that the Voynich plants may not be pure inventions, but hybrid reconstructions made by someone who retained partial morphological memory while other parts were distorted by folk traditions or impaired perceptual integration.
For example, on folio 3v (commonly compared to Succisa pratensis), we see:
In European folk botany, Succisa pratensis has the name Morsus diaboli (“Devil’s bite”), because its root appears abruptly truncated.
If a writer had partial memory of the plant plus knowledge of that folk story, it becomes very plausible—especially under cognitive strain—to produce a chimera-like reconstruction: some real features preserved, others replaced by symbolic or misremembered elements.
Across the botanical section, this pattern seems to repeat:
This doesn’t require a constructed language or deliberate plant invention.
Instead, it fits a model where the writer was trying to record meaningful material, but their perceptual and semantic systems were no longer fully integrated, producing semi-recognizable hybrids rather than accurate botanical illustrations.
If it’s helpful, I can point to additional folios where this “partial recognizability → symbolic drift” pattern is even clearer.
Can you post anything that is not AI generated?
Did you just copy and paste from the ai prompts?
Yes, I use AI for translation because English is not my first language.
However, the ideas and hypotheses themselves are mine.
The AI did not generate them independently.
If you ask ChatGPT about the Voynich Manuscript without this context,
it will not spontaneously propose neurological or psycholinguistic models.
Those interpretations come from my own prior analysis.
That's an interesting theory.
Thanks! Glad you found it interesting.
You might be interested in watching this YouTube video. It’s by a paleography professor at Yale University. Yale is the current owner of the manuscript. She’s had access to the book and determined that five scribes probably wrote the manuscript. She also mentions that the linguistic variations in it seems to be correlated with which scribe was writing the text.
Thanks for sharing this — I’m familiar with the Yale paleography analysis, and I agree that the manuscript likely involved multiple scribes. The variation in ductus and linguistic habits between folios makes sense under that model.
However, the multi-scribe hypothesis alone still leaves several structural problems unexplained, especially in the Zodiac section.
If different scribes were simply contributing portions, we would expect:
internal consistency within each scribe’s section
no accidental duplication of motifs across writers
no systemic omissions that line up with cognitive patterns rather than material ones
But the Zodiac folios show the opposite:
• Duplicated constellations (Pisces appearing twice, Aries/Taurus doubled)
• Missing folios in positions that should be stable in any astronomical cycle
• Sequence irregularities that mirror recall-order bias and perseveration, not collaborative work
These distortions map surprisingly well onto known cognitive patterns in TBI patients:
repeated content due to perseveration
skipped positions due to recall gaps
structural drift even when the artist’s motor skill remains intact
This is why I’m leaning toward a model where:
1.Multiple scribes may have been involved in copying or decorative work,
2.But the underlying conceptual layer — the “generator” of the imagery — was produced by a single impaired mind whose recall patterns shaped the Zodiac sequence.
In short:
multi-scribe paleography explains the handwriting,
but not the architecture of the errors.
The architecture aligns much more clearly with cognitive dysfunction than with collaborative production.
I’m very interested in how others interpret this mismatch between “who held the pen” and “who shaped the structure.”