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We all know the phrase two heads are better than one, but according to researchers at the University of Vermont, a whole crowd could carry the answers (or questions as is the case) to some of the toughest problems of modernity.

Beginning with an experiment conducted in 1714 by the British government and which has since continued to gain popularity as "a new way to do science," crowdsourcing is the harbinger of modern poll taking, trend making and fact-checking. Coined in 2006, crowdsourcing became a way of posing a question or asking for help from a large group of people.

According to the University of Vermont, web-based information sites such as Wikipedia and climateprediction.net are kept running by unpaid volunteers who serve as a generally trusted populace of information experts. Professors Josh Bongard and Paul Hines in UVM's College of Engineering and Mathematical sciences now ask: if a random crowd can eventually come up with answers to problems that confound great minds, could this same crowd come up with the questions that lead to these answers.

Apparently? The answer is yes.

In a ground-breaking experiment volunteers who visited two different websites were asked to pose, refine, and answer questions of each other - that could effectively predict volunteers' body weight and home electricity use.

As stated in a report by the University, " The self-directed questions and answers by visitors to the websites led to computer models that effectively predict user's monthly electricity consumption and body mass index."

"It's proof of concept that a crowd actually can come up with good questions that lead to good hypotheses," says Bongard, an expert on machine science.

Hines adds in a University press release, "Sometimes the general public has intuition about stuff that experts miss."

For example, though the subject was weight-loss, some volunteers asked "How many times a day do you masturbate?" though weight-loss experts would not think this conducive to a weight-loss questionnaire, the Professors say, "it proved to be the second-most-predictive question of the volunteer's self-reported weights."

The UVM project shows that the wisdom of the crowd can be harnessed to determine which variables to study, while at the same time providing a pool of data by responding to the questions they ask of each other.

"The result is a crowd-sourced predictive model," the Vermont scientists write in their study "Crowdsourcing Predictors of Behavioral Outcomes," published in the  a journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. .

Experts conclude that, going forward, the public would be a great place to start deciding what would in fact be interesting to study.

So, we here at Couselheal would like to know: What would YOU be interested in knowing?

We at CounselHeal would like to do a little crowd experiment of our own: Please comment on what you would like CounselHeal to cover and write about (i.e. what the sites title means to you) and we will deliver.