[Cryptography] The Voynich Manuscript as a product of a mental health disorder

[Ray Dillinger]

On 1/21/19 1:37 AM, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> The Voynich Manuscript has attracted interest almost entirely from
> cryptographically-inclined people (alongside historians) who are by nature
> inclined to try and interpret it as some form of cipher or code, because they
> want to see a cipher or code there.  I recently tried a different approach, I
> showed it to a psychologist and asked "which type of mental health disorder
> could the creator of this work have?".

Hm.  That's a theory with some merit, and I don't remember anyone
considering it previously.

Last I heard about it, some folks had shown that its written content is
consistent with a method of producing a stream of gibberish (the
content-free part of a stream  cipher message) shaped into a fairly
language-consistent form using a Cardan Grille. The theory developed in
that paper was that someone (ISTR they had a particular suspect in mind
though I don't remember who) had produced this work of literal non-sense
as part of a fraud, using that method.

Of course, asemic writing is a known, if unusual, symptom seen in
psychiatric patients. Producing many pages of asemic gibberish using a
Cardan-grille method would be an extreme form of that, but could also be
interpreted as a manifestation of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The
"suspected of fraud" scholar may have genuinely discovered an
indecipherable work, as claimed, unsuspecting that the work was produced
by someone whose thought process was disordered.

				Bear

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