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In the late 1700s, researchers were interested in finding ways to link the brain and specific behaviors together, or essentially, brain mapping. One of these researchers was a German born physician, Franz Joseph Gall. He came up with five basic tenets including that the brain is the organ of the mind and is composed of distinct innate faculties, which means that each faculty should have a separate organ in the brain. He also claimed that the size of the brain is a measure of its power, and the shape is determined by the development of the brain (Brown, 2019). Based off his tenets, he believed that the physical features of the brain could be seen by examining the size and shape of the skull. He believed that when the skull took its shape from the brain, the surface of the skill could be read as an accurate state of psychological tendencies. He then came up with twenty-seven different ‘brain organs’, that he used to specify areas in the brain. A lot of the areas being linked to criminal behavior or deviant personalities. He called this aspect ‘phrenology’, which is based on the idea that personality traits are located on specific areas of the brain in which could be measured by feeling bumps on the skull. This idea was later discredited by empirical research in many ways.
Gall came up with this idea when he was examining a group of young kids who had tendencies linked to stealing and lying. He found that a good amount of these kids had bumps right above their ears on their skulls. He then suggested that the bumps above the ears indicate that you have tendencies to steal and lie, linking the area of bumps on the head to different aspects of a person’s character or personality (Cherry, 2018). Galls assumptions about personality and thoughts linking to specific areas of the brain is not necessarily wrong and is still used today in neuropsychology. Today instead of measuring people’s skulls and feeling for bumps to determine personality, we use imaging technology to look at the brains architecture and see which parts of the brain light up when we perform specific tests.
Phrenology was based off the surface of the skull, but could not tell what was really happening within the brain’s architecture. You simply cannot know what is going on inside of the mind by feeling around on someone’s head. Gall was also known to ignore anyone’s ideas that contradicted his ideas, and this made his idea extremely biased. Many researches have been done to debunk Gall’s phrenological ideas because of this reason. For example, a study by O. Parker Jones, F. Alfaro-Almagro, and S. Jbabdi was done to test the idea of phrenology empirically. They used structural MRI to quantify local curvatures on the scalp and gave participants questionnaires and cognitive test to determine personal measures. They then came up with a group of job-related personalities and questioned the participants on ways to find out if specific curvatures correlated with these personalities. They first found out that the gyrification in the brain hardly has anything to do with local scalp curvature (Parker Jones, 2018.) They then correlated local scalp curvature with a set of job-related lifestyle measures, and found no evidence to support phrenology’s first claims.
Although phrenology had become what people call a pseudoscience, Gall seemed to be onto something that has helped us throughout history, that acted as a prelude. Neuroimaging and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are both devices that are used today for studying the functions of the brain without having to conduct surgery by providing images of the organ itself. That being said, neuroimaging and MRIs somewhat share the same aspects with Gall. For example, MRIs can show us which areas of the brain will light up when the person is affected by an outside stimulus. With Gall, he was trying to find out which regions of the brain would link with criminal behaviors and we can today say that we have linked certain regions of the brain to certain criminal behaviors by using these devices (Brown, 2019). We can also use these image technology devices today to look at areas in the brain in which are linked to depression, anger, and many other traits.
Many people had negative thoughts about phrenology and still probably do to this day. But in the end, phrenology has helped psychology move forward in many ways. The idea that different regions of the brain are linked to different traits plays a role in both phrenology and today’s neuroscience, which is still heavily examined. Phrenologist back in the day were looking for individual differences, which is also studied by psychologists today, and that is something that is still important and difficult in figuring out, because everyone is so unique. Galls focus on phrenology influenced researches to become more interested in the concept of mental functions being localization in particular areas on the brain, and this is what has moved us forward today as a nation in the psychology field. Gall specifically looked at areas in the brain in which were associated with criminal behavior, but today we can predict areas of the brain that are associated with many behaviors by using imaging technologies.
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