Thursday, March 10, 2011

Phrenology

Phrenology is a pseudoscience that is primarily focused on measurements of the human skull. The basic concepts of Phrenology entail the idea that the brain is an organ of the mind and that certain areas of the brain have specific functions or modules, a theory titled "modularity of mind." Phrenologists believed that the mind has a set of different mental faculties, with each particular faculty represented in a different area of the brain. The intellectual basis of Phrenology entails that moral and intellectual faculties are innate, exercise of faculties require organization, that the brain is the organ of in charge of all faculties and that since the form of the cranium represnts the form of the brain they are reflective of each other. The complex process of Phrenology included feeling of the bumps of the skull in order to determine ones psychological attributes. Founder Franz Joseph Gall believed that the brain was comprised of 27 individual organs that created ones personality. The study of Phrenology has long been dismissed as pseudoscience due to neurological advances. Scholars find it to be pseudoscience since it neither makes risky predictions nor provides the chance for others to prove if it is a real theory.

1 comment:

  1. I take neurobiology now and when the idea of phrenology is brought up to a real neuroscientist, it is laughed at. The advances in neurobiology really have proved phrenology to be just a pseudoscience.

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