Phrenology: like reading a crystal ball, but with
They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but they never
said anything about not judging a man by the bumps on his skull. So
phrenologists went out and did just that.
By taking measurements of the skull, phrenology's founder Franz Josef Gall argued around the
turn of the 1800s, you could determine a person's personality
traits, propensities, and intelligence. This was because the region
of the brain responsible for, say, self-esteem, would grow larger
in a more confident person, consequently pushing out the skull.
Phrenologists could feel a subject's head for these abnormalities,
a bit like a psychic reading a crystal ball, in the sense that both
practices are absurd ways to relieve people of their money.
Aside from its many scientific problems, phrenology also had
social consequences. The theory came about in the dark days of
colonialism and wormed its way into Europeans' judgments of the
peoples they were subjugating. For instance, in Rwanda, the
Belgians' phrenological assessments deemed the Tutsis more intelligent than the Hutus, helping to
sow the seeds for a genocide that took place decades later. And
these methods were of course broadened to deem Europeans inherently
more intelligent than Africans.
But Franz Josef Gall's theory that behaviors and thought
processes are contained in certain parts of the brain turned out to
have a grain of truth. Decades later, brain scans showed that many
parts of the brain are indeed more active during specific
activities. More recently, there's been a backlash against the kind
of overly simplistic "neophrenology" that pins specific functions
on specific brain regions. Exactly what job -- or jobs -- any given
part of the brain does is a question that will keep neuroscientists
scratching their heads for years
Next -- Life on the Sun and, for that matter, life on
every planet. Life for everyone!