In this video I discuss phrenology, the work of Franz Josef Gall, and how this pseudoscience had a lasting positive impact on psychology.
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Video transcript:
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review where I answer common questions and explain the key concepts in psychology and in this video I’m going to talk about phrenology
and this is an idea that was popular in the first half of the 19th century and it mostly came from the work of a guy named Franz Josef Gall who lived from 1758 to 1828. And here’s a picture of Gall here not looking particularly happy.
Gall actually called his research cranioscopy. This was from the Greek cranium for skull and scopos for vision but it became more popularly known as phrenology which is from phrenos for mind and logos for study and the idea behind cranioscopy or phrenology was that the shape of the skull revealed abilities.
So Gall believed that the skull would change in response to the brain underneath and so if an area was enlarged in the brain then the skull would have to bulge out and if it was not so enlarged the skull might sort of cave in there. And so by studying these bumps and dents in the skull you could find out about a person’s abilities. He thought these revealed what he called faculties and so if we look at one of these images which you’ve probably seen before, where on the skull we have these labels. OK here’s the area for a love of poetry which was one of Gall’s faculties or maybe we have musical ability over here or memory for words over here or affection or friendship or any of these different faculties.
And so the idea was that if you were a real lover of poetry you might have a bulge here and if you were not particularly skilled in music you might have a dent over here.
But despite initial popularity phrenology kind of faded out. And the reason it faded out is that it was a pseudo-science. What happens when you have a pseudo-science is that as you get more data you actually end up with weaker evidence. So you can imagine if I only looked at two skulls and one person really loved poetry and they had a bulge here the other person hated poetry and had a dent I might think this might be the poetry area and as I look at more and more skulls I might coincidentally find a bunch of bulging poetry lovers here and a bunch of people who didn’t like poetry who had dents. But as I look at more and more skulls I might find that this correlation stops holding up so I’m going to find people who love poetry and don’t have a bulge there or people who hate poetry but do have a bulge there and so once I’ve collected data from a hundred or a thousands skulls I’m going to realize that there’s actually not a relationship between the shape of the skull and this particular ability.
So why do we still talk about phrenology? We aren’t going to go over every pseudoscientific belief in history but phrenology is an important one and that’s for two reasons. The first is that Gall got people thinking about the head as where things are happening as the most important area for understanding traits and abilities. And this might seem obvious to us today and and we might just assume that this would be true but remember it wasn’t so long before this people were thinking about other areas. People were thinking about the heart being important for certain traits or abilities or they were even thinking about humors in the body like bile.
But Gall got everybody focusing a little bit more on the head and in particular the brain underneath it. Remember because the skull shape was supposed to indicate actual brain matter underneath and that brings us to the second point and this is the idea known as localization of brain function and this is the idea that the brain is not this undifferentiated mass of jelly. It’s actually a collection of different structures that each have specific tasks that they perform and phrenology got people thinking this way.
It got people thinking about different regions of the brain having specialized tasks and this is actually true. And this is fundamental for modern neuroscience. The work of Gall and other phrenologists got more people to start thinking this way.
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