oracle cardsBy DailyDestiny Editorial Team

Automatic Writing: Method, History and How to Assess What You Get

Automatic writing, also called psychography or spirit writing, is the practice of putting pen to paper and letting words arrive without conscious composition. This guide gives the automatic writing technique step by step, traces it from Spiritualist seance rooms to the Surrealists, explains the ideomotor account, and shows how practitioners sort usable material from noise.

What is automatic writing, and why is it also called psychography?

Automatic writing is the production of text without deliberate composition: the hand moves, words appear on the page, and the writer reports not having chosen them in advance. The defining feature is not what the words say but how they arrive. In Spiritualist practice the material is attributed to a discarnate communicator, a guide, or a named deceased person, which is why the practice is equally known as spirit writing. Psychography is the older technical term, built from the Greek psyche and graphein, and it appears throughout nineteenth-century psychical research. It is still the standard word in Brazil, where psicografia describes the mediumistic production of letters, poems, and full-length books. Practitioners recognize degrees of automaticity rather than a single on-off state. In full automatism the hand writes while attention is elsewhere, and the writer reads the page afterwards with genuine surprise. In passive writing the writer watches the words forming a beat ahead of the pen and does not interfere. In inspirational writing whole phrases surface as inner speech and the hand transcribes them. Most people move between all three within a sitting.

The vocabulary matters because it tells you what a given tradition thinks it is doing. Nineteenth-century Spiritualists said spirit writing and meant it literally: an external intelligence using a borrowed hand. Frederic Myers and the Society for Psychical Research preferred automatism, a neutral word that left the source open, and grouped writing alongside automatic speech, crystal vision, and table-tilting as varieties of the same underlying capacity. Pierre Janet used automatisme psychologique for the same phenomena but located the source firmly inside the person, in a split-off stream of mental life. The Surrealists took the technique and dropped the spirits entirely. All four camps produced pages that look alike. What separates them is the account of where the words come from, and that account is decided before the pen moves, not by the page. It means automatic writing cannot settle its own origin question from the inside. A script that says it comes from your grandmother is evidence that the script says so, and nothing further. The interesting work happens in what you do with the pages afterwards, which is why assessment is treated here as part of the method.

What does psychography mean in automatic writing?

Psychography means soul-writing, from the Greek psyche and graphein, and names automatic writing considered as a mediumistic faculty rather than a creative exercise. The word entered English through nineteenth-century psychical research and survives most strongly as the Portuguese psicografia in Brazilian Spiritism, where it means written messages received by a medium and attributed to a named spirit.

Is spirit writing the same as automatic writing?

Spirit writing is automatic writing with a specific claim attached: that the source is an external, discarnate intelligence. The physical method is identical. A Surrealist writing at speed to bypass his own editing and a medium taking dictation from a guide do the same thing with their hands, and the pages can be indistinguishable. Spirit writing names the framing, not a separate technique.

Does automatic writing require a trance state?

No. Most automatic writing is done fully awake, eyes open or lightly closed, and many practitioners hold a conversation or listen to music while the hand works. Deep trance is the exception. What automatic writing does require is a suspension of the editing habit, which is a shift in attention rather than a loss of consciousness.

How do you do automatic writing, step by step?

To do automatic writing, sit with paper and a pen that flows without pressure, set a timer for fifteen minutes, write one clear question at the top of the page, then start moving the pen and do not stop until the timer ends. The full sequence practitioners teach runs in seven steps. First, choose the question and write it out in full, addressed to whoever or whatever you are asking. Second, settle for two or three minutes with slow breathing until the internal chatter drops. Third, put the pen on the paper and let it rest there, arm loose, shoulder unlocked. Fourth, begin with movement rather than meaning: loops, circles, or a repeated letter until the hand moves on its own. Fifth, let the movement become letters whenever it wants to, without deciding what they will spell. Sixth, keep the pen moving through nonsense and blanks, because stopping to evaluate is what ends a session. Seventh, when the timer sounds, finish the sentence you are on, put the pen down, write the date and time, and close the notebook without reading. That last step is the one beginners skip and the one that matters most for how to do automatic writing well.

The reason for closing the book unread is practical. Reading immediately puts you back into the editorial frame you spent fifteen minutes leaving, and the disappointment of seeing three lines of loops kills the next session. Practitioners with a sustainable automatic writing practice read their scripts on a separate day with several sessions in front of them, which is also the only way to notice repeated names or images across sittings. The pen matters more than people expect: a fountain pen or gel pen that writes without pressure removes the constant small effort of a ballpoint, and that effort is what keeps conscious control switched on. Paper should be unlined, because staying on the line is a form of supervision. Write large. Scripts often come out at two or three times normal size, and cramping the hand back down suppresses the flow. If the hand stops, do not lift the pen; hold it in contact and wait. Contact with the paper is the physical anchor of the whole automatic writing technique.

What question should you ask when starting automatic writing?

Start with an open question that cannot be answered yes or no, and keep it about the present rather than the future. What do I need to see about this situation, what am I avoiding, and what would you have me understand all work well in automatic writing. Questions with a date or a single factual answer produce either silence or confident nonsense.

How long should an automatic writing session last?

Fifteen to twenty minutes is the standard working length for automatic writing, and beginners often do better at ten. The limit is not mystical: sustained non-editing is tiring, and quality falls off once the hand gets sore. A timer set out of sight removes clock-watching. Practitioners who write for an hour break it into shorter sittings with a walk between.

What do you do if nothing comes during automatic writing?

Keep the pen moving and write the nothing. Practitioners write I have nothing, or the same letter, or a row of circles, for as long as it takes, because the motor habit almost always starts before the content does. A session that produces only loops still counts as training. Changing the question, the time of day, or the length of the sitting usually breaks a dry run of automatic writing.

What does the automatic writing technique need in terms of tools, setting, and timing?

The automatic writing technique needs a pen that moves without pressure, unlined paper, a supported forearm, a fixed time limit, and a setting quiet enough that you are not tracking sounds. Nothing else is required. Position does real work. Sit at a table with the writing arm resting from elbow to wrist so the hand moves without the shoulder holding it up, since a hovering arm needs constant conscious control. Some practitioners rest the non-writing hand flat on the page to steady it. Others hold a small object in it, an old habit from Spiritualist practice where a token belonging to the deceased was placed in the free hand. Lighting should be low enough that reading back mid-session is inconvenient, which is part of why candlelight persisted long after it stopped being necessary. Timing is personal but not arbitrary: the two windows practitioners name most often are the first twenty minutes after waking and the last hour before sleep, when the editing faculty is naturally loose. Caffeine sharpens focus and works against automatic writing. Alcohol makes the hand sloppy and the content unreliable.

Historical practitioners of spirit writing used instruments that removed the hand further from the words. The planchette, a small heart-shaped board on casters with a pencil pushed through a hole at the point, was popular from the 1850s onward: two or three sitters rested fingertips on the board and it wrote across a large sheet. It is the direct ancestor of the talking board patented in the United States in 1891, which replaced the pencil with a pointer and a printed alphabet. Both devices exist to make the connection between muscle and letter harder to feel, and that distance is what convinces sitters the movement is not theirs. Modern practitioners who want the same effect without a planchette write with the non-dominant hand, which produces large, unstable, child-like script. Others write with eyes closed, which removes the visual feedback that lets you correct a word mid-stroke. Both are legitimate versions of the automatic writing technique, and both trade legibility for a stronger sense of automaticity. Practitioners who work this way transcribe the script into ordinary handwriting the following day, while it is still readable.

Should you write with your non-dominant hand for automatic writing?

Writing with the non-dominant hand is a recognized variant of the automatic writing technique, used because unfamiliar motor control weakens the sense of authorship and makes the script feel external. The trade-off is legibility: non-dominant script is large, unsteady, and often unreadable within a day, so practitioners transcribe each session soon after. It is a useful way in for people who cannot stop editing.

Do you need candles, incense, or protection rituals for automatic writing?

None of these are mechanically necessary for automatic writing. What ritual provides is a repeatable signal that the session has started, which shortens the settling phase over time. Within Spiritualist and Spiritist practice, opening and closing prayers also serve a boundary function: they mark when the writer is available and when the sitting is finished, which matters for people who find material intruding afterwards.

What time of day is best for automatic writing?

The first twenty minutes after waking and the hour before sleep are the two windows practitioners recommend most for automatic writing, because the critical, editing part of attention is loosest at both. Ruth Montgomery worked at her typewriter each morning as a fixed appointment. Consistency beats optimal timing: the same slot daily trains the state faster than picking whichever moment feels right.

Where did spirit writing come from, and who were its best-known practitioners?

Spirit writing entered the modern West through Spiritualism, the movement that spread from the Fox sisters' rapping phenomena at Hydesville, New York, in 1848, and it quickly became the tidiest seance-room technique because it produced a document. In France, Allan Kardec, the pen name of Hippolyte Leon Denizard Rivail, systematized the material into a doctrine with The Spirits' Book in 1857, and Kardecist Spiritism carried psychography to Brazil, where it became psicografia and remains widely practiced. The most prolific figure in that lineage is Chico Xavier, the Brazilian medium who published his first collection, Parnaso de Alem-Tumulo, in 1932, attributing its poems to deceased Portuguese and Brazilian writers, and went on to produce hundreds of volumes over seven decades. In England, William Stainton Moses, an Anglican clergyman, produced the scripts published as Spirit Teachings. The journalist W. T. Stead published the material he attributed to a deceased American acquaintance as Letters from Julia, before he died aboard the Titanic in 1912. In St. Louis, Pearl Curran began receiving material in 1913 that identified itself as Patience Worth and produced novels and verse in archaic English for over two decades.

Automatic writing history has literary and psychological strands running alongside the Spiritualist one. Theodore Flournoy's study of the medium he called Helene Smith, published in 1900 as Des Indes a la planete Mars, examined scripts that included an invented Martian alphabet, and Flournoy concluded the material came from the medium's own submerged creativity rather than from Mars. George Yeats began automatic writing days after her 1917 marriage to W. B. Yeats, and the scripts the couple accumulated over years became the system her husband set out in A Vision. Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote Les Champs magnetiques in 1919 by taking dictation from themselves at speed, and Breton's 1924 Surrealist manifesto defined the movement as psychic automatism in its pure state, borrowing the Spiritualists' method while discarding their spirits. The most ambitious use of automatic writing as evidence remains the cross-correspondences, scripts produced from the early 1900s by several separate automatists connected to the Society for Psychical Research, among them Margaret Verrall, Alice Fleming, and Winifred Coombe-Tennant. Each script carried classical allusions that appeared meaningless alone and formed a pattern only when compared.

What is a planchette and how was it used for spirit writing?

A planchette is a small heart-shaped board on two casters with a pencil fixed vertically through the point, popularized from the 1850s. Sitters rested their fingertips on it and it moved across a large sheet, writing. It was the dominant spirit writing instrument of the Victorian seance room and the design ancestor of the talking board patented in the United States in 1891, which swapped the pencil for a pointer.

Who was Chico Xavier and what is psicografia?

Chico Xavier was a Brazilian Spiritist medium, born in 1910 and died in 2002, who produced hundreds of books by psicografia, the Portuguese term for psychography. His first, Parnaso de Alem-Tumulo, appeared in 1932 and collected poems attributed to deceased Portuguese and Brazilian poets. He wrote publicly, gave the proceeds to charity, and remains the best-known automatic writing practitioner in the Kardecist tradition.

What were the cross-correspondences in automatic writing research?

The cross-correspondences were automatic writing scripts produced independently by several automatists linked to the Society for Psychical Research from the early 1900s, after the deaths of the society's founding figures. Individually the scripts held obscure classical references; investigators argued the fragments interlocked when laid together, which they read as a designed signature no single writer could have produced. They remain contested.

What is the ideomotor effect, and how does it explain automatic writing?

The ideomotor effect is the production of muscular movement by an idea, without the mover feeling that they intended it, and it is the standard non-spirit explanation for automatic writing. William Benjamin Carpenter coined the term ideo-motor in 1852 to describe exactly this: an expectation converting into small muscular action below the threshold of awareness. The groundwork was already there. Michel-Eugene Chevreul had shown in the 1830s that a hand-held pendulum swings according to what the holder expects, and that the swing stops when the holder's arm is braced or the expectation removed. Michael Faraday tested table-turning in 1853 by placing a card layer between sitters' hands and the table top; the cards moved before the table did, meaning the sitters were pushing. Applied to automatic writing, the ideomotor account says the words are yours, generated by the same language faculties that produce inner speech, and the sense of not having authored them comes from the absence of the usual feeling of deliberate effort. Absence of the sense of agency is not absence of agency. The hand does what your language system tells it, and the reporting system that normally says I did that is quiet.

The ideomotor account is not a claim that automatic writing is fraud, and treating it that way misses what makes the effect interesting. The people producing the writing genuinely do not experience it as their own composition, and that experience is reliable and reproducible. The nearest modern parallel is facilitated communication, where a supporter physically supports the hand of a non-speaking person and messages appear; controlled testing that showed the facilitator and the writer different pictures found the messages matched what the facilitator had seen. The lesson is not that automatic writing is worthless, but that no amount of subjective certainty about the source substitutes for a test. Spiritualist and Spiritist practitioners typically respond that the ideomotor mechanism describes the delivery, not the origin, and that a communicator would necessarily use the medium's own muscles and vocabulary to say anything at all. That position is coherent and also unfalsifiable from inside the session, which is why the assessment methods below rely on verifiable content and cross-session pattern.

Does the ideomotor effect mean automatic writing is fake?

No. The ideomotor effect explains how the movement happens, not whether the content is worthless. Automatic writing produced ideomotorically is still material the writer did not consciously compose, which is why it surfaces associations and phrasings that deliberate writing does not. What the account rules out is treating the feeling of not having written something as evidence that an external source wrote it.

How did Faraday test the ideomotor effect?

Michael Faraday tested table-turning in 1853 by stacking cards between the sitters' hands and the table surface, held with a soft adhesive so any slippage would show. The cards shifted in the direction of the table's eventual movement before the table moved, showing the sitters' hands were pushing rather than following. It is the classic demonstration underlying the ideomotor explanation of automatic writing.

Why does automatic writing feel like it comes from outside you?

Automatic writing feels external because the ordinary sense of authorship depends on a felt effort of deliberation, and the technique deliberately removes it. When words arrive fully formed without that effort, the mind's default attribution is that somebody else made them. The same mechanism explains why the voice in a dream feels like another person speaking. The feeling is real and consistent; it just is not evidence about origin.

How do practitioners assess what automatic writing produces?

Practitioners assess automatic writing on three separate axes, and keeping them separate is what stops the practice from collapsing into self-flattery. The first is verifiability: does the script contain a name, a date, a place, an object, or a fact the writer could not have known, and can it be checked against something outside the notebook? Verifiable items are rare, so they are marked in the margin the day they appear and confirmed or refused later with the date of confirmation written in. The second axis is consistency: does the same voice, vocabulary, name, or image return across sessions weeks apart, and does its position stay stable when the writer's mood changes? Material that flatters on a good day and scolds on a bad one is tracking the writer. The third is usefulness: did acting on the script improve anything checkable, and would an outside observer agree? These three do not have to agree. Automatic writing can be unverifiable, wholly consistent, and useful, which is the ordinary case. Practitioners who log all three stop overweighting whichever one felt strongest at the time.

The mechanics of assessment are dull and that is the point. Number every session, date it, note the time, the question, the duration, and one line on physical state before starting: tired, caffeinated, upset, calm. Read scripts in batches of five or more, never singly, and at least three days after writing so the emotional charge has faded. Mark recurring words across the batch; repeated proper nouns and repeated images are the two things worth tracking, and they show up far more clearly across five sessions than within one. Keep a separate page of predictions with a check-back date next to each, and go back on those dates whether or not you want to. Practitioners who have kept scripts for years report the same pattern: a small number of striking hits, a much larger volume of material that reads as their own thinking in an unfamiliar register, and a slow drift in the voice that tracks their own reading. That drift is itself diagnostic. A communicator whose vocabulary expands whenever the writer starts a new book is telling you something about the source.

How do you tell automatic writing from your own thoughts?

Inside a session you generally cannot, and practitioners who claim otherwise are relying on the felt quality of the writing, which is what the technique manipulates. The usable distinctions are external: content you demonstrably did not know, checked against an outside source, and vocabulary outside your normal range across many sessions. Feeling certain in the moment is the least reliable indicator in automatic writing.

Should you keep a log of automatic writing sessions?

Yes, and the log is what turns automatic writing from an experience into a practice you can evaluate. Record the session number, date, time, question, duration, and your state beforehand, and add a running page for any checkable claim with a date to verify it. Without the log, memory keeps the hits and discards the misses, which makes the practice feel far more accurate than the pages support.

What counts as a verifiable hit in automatic writing?

A verifiable hit in automatic writing is a specific, checkable item written down before it was known and confirmed afterwards from an independent source: a full name, a street, a date, an unusual object, an illness. Vague statements that fit many situations do not count, and neither does anything confirmed only by the person who asked. The written-before-confirmed order is the whole test.

What does automatic writing usually produce on the page?

Automatic writing typically produces four kinds of output, and knowing them in advance stops beginners from discarding perfectly normal sessions. The first is motor material: loops, repeated letters, a single word written forty times, script that drifts off the edge of the paper. This dominates early sessions and is the hand learning the state. The second is fragmentary content: half-sentences, single names, isolated images, phrases that break off mid-clause. Most of the striking material appears here, and it needs the log to be useful because a lone name means nothing until it recurs. The third is continuous address, where a voice speaks directly to the writer in the second person, in a steady, slightly formal register, often warmer than the writer's own inner voice. This is what most people mean when they say automatic writing worked. The fourth is extended composition: sustained passages with structure or narrative, of the kind that produced book-length Spiritualist texts. It is rare and arrives late, if at all. Handwriting itself shifts across these modes, with larger letters, unclosed loops, and missing punctuation as the flow deepens.

Certain features recur across the tradition strongly enough to be worth naming. Scripts frequently arrive without punctuation and with no spaces between words, which suggests the output is not passing through the machinery that normally formats speech into writing. Archaic or elevated diction is common, and Pearl Curran's Patience Worth material is the extreme case, sustained in pseudo-archaic English over decades. Mirror writing appears occasionally, more often in non-dominant-hand work. Names arrive more readily than dates, and dates are the least reliable content the practice produces; practitioners who keep records find predicted dates fail more often than any other category. Direct answers to direct questions are also uncommon. Ask automatic writing whether to take a job and you are more likely to get a description of your own fear about the job than a yes. That tendency to reframe rather than answer is why practitioners treat the technique as an instrument for looking at a situation rather than a source of instructions.

Why does handwriting change during automatic writing?

Handwriting during automatic writing typically becomes larger and less controlled, with unclosed loops, absent punctuation, and words running together, because the fine motor supervision that keeps writing neat is part of what the technique suspends. Some practitioners see a consistent script emerge that differs from their normal hand, which Spiritualist tradition reads as the communicator's signature and the ideomotor account reads as an unpracticed motor pattern.

Can automatic writing predict the future?

Dates and predictions are the weakest output automatic writing produces, and practitioners who log their scripts find predicted dates fail more often than any other category. The tradition's own advice is to avoid asking, because a failed prediction damages trust in material that might have been useful otherwise. Automatic writing tends to reframe a present situation rather than forecast a future one.

What does it mean if automatic writing produces only one repeated word?

A single repeated word in automatic writing usually means the motor loop has engaged before any content has, which is the normal early stage rather than a failure. Practitioners let it run rather than stopping, since the loop frequently breaks into a full phrase after half a page. If the same word repeats across many sessions, it is worth writing it at the top of the next page as the question and seeing what follows.

What problems come up in automatic writing, and how do practitioners handle them?

Four problems recur in automatic writing, and each has a standard handling in the tradition. The first is the material becoming authoritative: a voice that issues instructions, claims a grand identity, or tells the writer they are chosen. The handling is a flat rule that no script is acted on alone, and that anything demanding money, a broken relationship, or secrecy is discarded however convincing it reads. The second is compulsive frequency, where sessions creep from twenty minutes a few times a week to hours daily and the notebook gets consulted before ordinary decisions. The handling is a fixed schedule set in advance and kept. The third is content that turns hostile or frightening, common enough to be expected rather than alarming; the response is to stop mid-sentence, stand up, do something physical and ordinary, then leave a few days before the next sitting. The fourth is fabrication creeping in, where the writer notices they are helping the sentence along. The handling is honesty in the log: mark the passage as assisted rather than deleting it, because a script with honest annotations stays useful and a tidied one does not.

Group practice changes the risk profile in both directions. Brazilian Spiritist centers practice psicografia in a structured setting with named roles, doctrinal limits on what may be asked, and other people present who read the material, which makes runaway private narratives hard to sustain. Working alone removes that check entirely. Practitioners who work solo compensate by showing scripts to one trusted person who is not invested in the outcome, someone willing to say a passage sounds like the writer on a bad day. Certain conditions call for leaving automatic writing alone rather than managing it: an active period of intrusive thought, recent bereavement where the writer hopes for contact with a specific person, or any diagnosed dissociative condition. In bereavement the technique will produce exactly what is longed for, and older Spiritualist manuals advised waiting a period after a death before attempting contact. The principle across every strand of this practice is that automatic writing is a tool for looking, and any session that starts issuing orders has stopped being that.

What should you do if automatic writing turns frightening?

Stop mid-sentence, put the pen down, stand up, and do something ordinary such as washing up or walking outside. Do not argue with the material on the page and do not keep writing to see where it goes. Practitioners leave several days before the next sitting and shorten it when they return. Frightening content in automatic writing is common enough to be expected, not treated as an emergency.

Who should avoid automatic writing?

Automatic writing is not recommended for anyone in an active period of intrusive or distressing thought, anyone with a diagnosed dissociative condition, or anyone in fresh bereavement hoping to reach one specific person. In all three cases the technique reliably supplies what the mind is already pushing toward. Older Spiritualist manuals advised waiting a substantial period after a death before attempting contact.

Should you show your automatic writing to other people?

One outside reader is the most effective safeguard in solo automatic writing practice. Choose someone with no stake in the content who will say plainly when a passage sounds like you in a particular mood. Group traditions build this in: Brazilian Spiritist centers practice psicografia with others present and doctrinal limits on what may be asked, which prevents the escalating private narratives solo practice can produce.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to get results from automatic writing?

Most people who stick with automatic writing get something legible within three to six sessions, though the first few usually produce loops, repeated words, or scribble that trails off the page. Practitioners treat that stage as normal rather than as failure. Sessions of fifteen to twenty minutes, done four or five times a week for a fortnight, produce more usable spirit writing than one long attempt a month.

Can you do automatic writing on a keyboard instead of paper?

Yes, and several well-known practitioners did. Ruth Montgomery worked at a typewriter each morning and produced her books that way. Typing removes handwriting cues some writers rely on, such as the shift in slant that signals a change in the material, but it is faster to read back. Automatic writing for beginners usually starts with pen and paper, because the hand feel is part of the signal.

Is automatic writing dangerous?

Automatic writing carries no physical danger, but it can be psychologically absorbing in ways worth watching. The material addresses you directly, in the second person, with apparent authority, which makes it unusually persuasive. Practitioners set limits: a fixed session length, no decisions made on a single script, and a pause if the content turns accusatory or grandiose. Anyone with a history of intrusive thoughts or dissociation is advised to leave this technique alone.

What is the difference between automatic writing and channeling?

Automatic writing produces a written artifact through the hand while the writer stays awake and often fully aware, and the page is the primary record. Channeling more commonly refers to spoken delivery, with the communicator addressing people in the room through the practitioner's voice, sometimes with a shift in accent or posture. Psychography sits at the quiet end of the spectrum: no audience, one person and a notebook.

Why does automatic writing produce the same phrases over and over?

Repetition is the most common feature of early automatic writing, and it usually means the motor loop has started before any content has. The hand has learned to move; it has nothing to carry yet. Practitioners let a repeated word run for a page rather than stopping, since the loop often breaks on its own into a full sentence. If it never breaks, try a different question, a different hour, or a shorter sitting.

Do you need a spirit guide to do automatic writing?

No. Plenty of automatic writing is done with no named recipient, addressed to nobody, and treated as material from the writer's own deeper layers. The Surrealists wrote this way on purpose. Within Spiritualism the practice is framed as spirit writing and a guide is invited by name; in Brazilian Spiritism, psicografia is regulated by doctrine and practiced in a group. The technique is identical in all three; only the framing differs.

How do you know if automatic writing is real or just your imagination?

There is no test inside the session that settles it, which is why serious practitioners test outside the session. The checkable route is verifiable content: a name, a date, a location, or a detail the writer had no way to know, written down before it is confirmed. Everything else is assessed on usefulness rather than origin. The cross-correspondence scripts collected by the Society for Psychical Research remain the most ambitious attempt to build evidence from automatic writing, and they are still argued over.