Archive — Peer Rejected

[1]

REJ:2026.08.27.0001 neuro.CJ (Neuro-Conjecture) Rejected

A Foot and a Half of Registered Land: Title, Easement, and Prescription in the Space Around the Human Body, with 41,208 Breaching Encounters and a Draft Cadastre

Wren Ackerley, Ines Delacour, Halvard Sømme & The Cadastral Working Party

Comments: 7 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 22 minutes on Aug 27, 2026.

Abstract: Stand a little closer to the person beside you. They will move, and neither of you will have decided anything. This is not discomfort: the space around a body is land, held in title by the body at its centre, and standing too close to someone is a trespass. We surveyed that land. Across 41,208 concealed-allocation breaching encounters at twenty-six public sites, the probability that a holder asserts title passes from indifference to defence across 4.1 , mathrm cm of approach (95% CI 3.8 – 4.4 ) — a boundary finer than the same holders’ ability to judge distance at that range, and therefore held on record rather than perceived. Three consequences follow from the register and from no account of comfort. Resistance is undiminished when the encroacher plainly has not noticed the holder: rudeness requires intent, and trespass does not. Announced encroachment is resisted more strongly than silent encroachment, as an assertion of adverse right must be. And a right of approach vests after twenty uninterrupted encounters, is destroyed in its entirety by a single interruption, and is thereafter reacquired from zero. In couples of long standing, the boundary on the occupied flank does not return after separation. You are not uncomfortable. You are being dispossessed.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[2]

REJ:2026.08.07.0001 neuro.CJ (Neuro-Conjecture) Rejected

Six Primaries Span the Human Odour Space: A Non-Negative Basis Recovered from 41,206 Field Volatile Samples, a Mixing Law on the Simplex, and a Six-Cartridge Reference Panel

Rohan Kadambi, Elke Tervoort, Chidi Onuoha, Paloma Ferreiro Cruz & The Six-Site Volatile Survey

Comments: 6 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 36 minutes on Aug 7, 2026.

Abstract: Vision has three primaries. Hearing has one continuous axis. Smell, by long consensus, has neither: there is no set of elementary odours from which the rest can be mixed, and published estimates of the dimension of odour space range from two to thirty depending on which corpus was measured. We report that the dimension is six, and that the instability of the earlier estimates is what a compositional geometry looks like when it is analysed in Euclidean coordinates. Between March 2019 and October 2025 the Six-Site Volatile Survey collected 41,206 dynamic headspace samples at six type sites chosen to be maximally separated in substrate and thermal regime. Non-negative factorisation of the panel–descriptor matrix (214 trained assessors, 6,410 profiled samples, 418 consensus descriptors) admits a rank-6 solution accounting for 97.4% of panel-explainable variance; the seventh factor adds 0.31 percentage points, and cophenetic correlation falls from 0.994 to 0.951 across that step. Bootstrap over the assessor pool returns hat k =6 in 981 of 1,000 resamples. Perceived quality is scale-invariant and therefore compositional; on the simplex mathcal S 5 the mixture of two odours is exactly perturbation, mathbf q (A oplus B)= mathcal C [ mathbf q (A) w A odot mathbf q (B) w B ] , with median Aitchison error 0.084 over 6,120 binary blends against 1.71 for linear mixing, and 0.097 over 1,880 ternary blends predicted with no free parameters. We then built the basis. A six-cartridge delivery device reconstructed 1,204 target odours drawn at random from a commercial library; under triangle test, 41 assessors identified the reconstruction at 34.0% (95% CI 32.9 – 35.1 ) against a chance rate of 33.3%. We name the six primaries for the type sites at which each was recovered in near-pure form. A seventh component is present in 1.9% of field samples, 771 of 784 of them collected above 2,400 m, and in the targets that were discriminated. We have not accounted for it, and we do not report it as a primary.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[3]

REJ:2026.07.20.0001 neuro.CJ (Neuro-Conjecture) Rejected

Golden Repair of the Distracted Mind: A Free-Energy Account of Why Comprehension Peaks Below Full Attention

Mira Solano-Beck, Anders K. Ravel & P. T. Oyelaran

Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 25 minutes on Jul 20, 2026.

Abstract: Nearly everyone has read a page while half-listening to a meeting and, on looking up, understood it better than a paragraph read in complete silence. Received wisdom calls this luck or self-deception. We argue it is a law. Modelling comprehension as a load-bearing lattice on which attention acts as stress rather than fuel, we show that full attention over-loads the lattice until it turns brittle and shatters, while fragmented attention opens small micro-fractures that the mind repairs with densely cross-linked “gold seams” — a process we term auric reconsolidation. Because a repaired bond is stronger than the one it replaces, comprehension is an inverted-U in engagement, peaking not at full focus but at a golden engagement fraction eta star approx 0.11 . Across N = 312 readers we measure a Kintsugi Quotient mathrm KQ = 1.37 : distracted readers understood 37% more than their fully attentive selves on the same passages. The effect is causal (reproduced by deliberate interruption), mechanistically visible in EEG, and falsifiable — closing the repair window abolishes it entirely. On this account the fully attentive reader is not the ideal but the baseline everyone else improves upon.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[4]

REJ:2026.07.10.0001 neuro.CJ (Neuro-Conjecture) Rejected

The Car Park Is an Ocean: A Navigational Reclassification of the Multi-Storey Structure, with a Randomized Trial of Instrument-Free Wayfinding

Moana R. Ellingham-Teiva, Desmond K. Whitlock & Priya S. Vanterpool-Okafor

Comments: 8 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 18 minutes on Jul 10, 2026.

Abstract: Everyone has lost a car in a multi-storey car park, and everyone has drawn the same two conclusions: the building is badly designed, and their memory is going. We show that both conclusions are wrong, and that the correct conclusion is considerably worse. Surveying five environments for stable distinguishable features—the fixed, tell-apart-able landmarks that human navigation actually runs on—we find that a multi-storey car park offers 0.4 usable features per hectare, fewer than the Sahara ( 2.3 ) and fewer than the open Pacific ( 1.9 ). By the only metric that matters to a navigator, the car park is not a building. It is an ocean, and an unusually bare one. This reclassification explains the memory problem: in a longitudinal study of 64 drivers we find that recall of one’s parking level decays with a half-life of 41 minutes and is destroyed outright by the act of paying, while the same participants recall where they sat in a caf\’e at 91 % . Nothing is being forgotten; below a measurable landmark floor the brain files each visit as a duplicate of the last, so that every visit to a car park is a first visit. Memory being unavailable in principle, the environment must be navigated instead—and the appropriate technology has existed for three thousand years. In a randomized trial ( N = 81 ), participants given six weeks of instrument-free wayfinding training adapted from Pacific practice—reading trolley drift as current, tire-sheen as swell, pigeon transects as land-finding birds, and the ceiling’s sprinkler grid as a star compass—located their vehicles 2.8 times faster than smartphone users and 4.3 times faster than controls, with zero failures. The problem was never your memory. We keep issuing sailors a floor plan.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[5]

REJ:2026.07.02.0001 neuro.CJ (Neuro-Conjecture) Rejected

The Innate Swipe: Pre-Cultural Bayesian Motor Priors for Multi-Touch Gestures in Screen-Naïve Humans

Wren A. Halloway, Ojo A. Adeyemi, Priya Venkataraman & Tomas Rohrbach

Comments: 7 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 19 minutes on Jul 2, 2026.

Abstract: The multi-touch gesture set—the horizontal swipe, pinch-to-zoom, tap, and edge-drag—is universally treated as a designed convention that users acquire through exposure. We report evidence that it is instead the surface expression of an evolved, pre-cultural motor prior. Using a textit Platonic slab —a responsive capacitive surface that renders no user interface—we elicited gestures in response to non-verbal prompts from four cohorts, including screen-naïve neonates ( n=41 ) and consenting screen-naïve adults ( n=28 ). Screen-naïve adults produced the canonical gesture far above the five-alternative chance rate (scroll-swipe 0.71 , pinch-to-zoom 0.66 , tap-select 0.58 ; all p<10 -6 ) and were well-calibrated in the Tetlock sense (Brier 0.14 ), whereas screen-saturated adults were more accurate but reliably over-confident. Fitting an innateness temperature beta yields hat beta=3.9 (95% CI [3.1,4.8] ) on the responsive slab but only 0.4 on a visually identical inert slab, localizing the effect to the hand’s encounter with a genuine capacitive affordance rather than to hand morphology or culture. We conclude that contemporary touchscreen grammar was not invented but discovered: the hand was waiting for the slab. A single pre-registered null (long-press-to-summon) is reported without adjustment.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]