Why phrenology is wrong

Stanely Finger, and Prof. Many of these functions, such as love of offspring and memory for locations, humans share with animals; some functions, including wit, poetry, and religion, are uniquely human. Gall also posited that the two hemispheres of the brain were practically interchangeable and held similar functions. He also believed that should one hemisphere sustain damage, the other could compensate. This was partly thanks to a series of lectures he gave alongside his protege, physician Johann Kaspar Spurzheim, and partly thanks to other adepts of phrenology picking up his ideas.

One such adept was Scottish lawyer and phrenologist George Combe — , who wrote about this pseudoscience in various books, including Elements of Phrenology , which he published in In this book, Combe also lays out the view that different parts of the brain play different roles.

He had five reasons for this:. Reportedly , Combe was such a believer in the accuracy of phrenology assessments that he only married his wife after they had both undergone such an examination to determine whether or not they were well suited for each other. According to science historian Dr. However, Dr. Renneville also notes that in the second half of the 19th century, phrenology was already losing its popularity. Although the ideas that phrenology put forth may have been fascinating at the time, and although this pseudoscience did contribute to some real scientific progress in understanding how the brain works, it also contributed to solidifying some discriminatory notions.

Citing 19th-century American phrenologist Orson Fowler — , historian Dr. Some also used phrenology to uphold scientific racism — that is, the misuse of scientific and pseudoscientific ideas to claim that one race is superior to others. In the 19th-century U. He claimed that individuals of African origin were unequal to Caucasians in their mental constitution — based only on the shape of their skulls.

Other contemporary physicians, such as Samuel George Morton — , claimed something similar about American Indian populations to justify forcing them out of the territories where they originally lived. These faculties included everything from reproduction to affection, vanity, and musical ability.

Through his study, Gall came to believe that the shape of the brain matched the shape of the skull that encased it, so studying the bumps and indentations of the skull could reveal the function and character of the brain beneath. Later phrenologists came to believe that people could strengthen their positive brain organs. Like weightlifting builds muscle, the brain was an organ to be exercised. While phrenology became very popular in Europe, it found its most devoted audience in the United States.

One reason phrenology attracted so many followers was that it seemed to provide the toolbox for the American dream. All classes of society found much to admire in phrenology. Phrenology seemed to provide what the strict Calvinist religion of Puritanical America had not: a way to better what God gave you, empowering individuals to help shape their own future, and making man the master of his own mind.

Moreover, phrenology also became commercialized in the United States, in large part due to the efforts of the Fowler family. The Fowler brothers, Lorenzo Niles and Orson Squire, turned their interest in phrenology into a substantial business based in New York City in the s.

The son of a farmer and church deacon from upstate New York, Orson first pursued the ministry but found his true calling in phrenology. He began to lecture on the topic to his classmates at Amherst College in Massachusetts and offered head readings for two cents each.

After graduation, the brothers put aside their plans for a life in the church for another kind of missionary work. The Fowlers translated phrenology into a doctrine of perfectionism, a set plan designed to create a perfect social and moral system.

Their version of phrenology attempted to bring together all the strands of science capable of improving the mind or benefiting mankind, which they believed would herald a new and better world. And like all true-blooded 19th century American entrepreneurs, they also just happened to sell the phrenological gear and accessories needed to make this happen. After her marriage to Lorenzo Fowler in , Lydia Folger began lecturing on phrenology, physiology, anatomy, and hygiene to largely female audiences.

She also established her own medical practice in New York City, specializing in the health of women and children, while continuing to write and lecture on phrenology with her husband. Many women practiced phrenology, though fewer became recognized leaders like Lydia than in other forms of alternative medicine.

In part, this was because phrenology lacked organizational structure and cohesion. Phrenology was largely an individual pursuit. There was no national phrenological association, and most patients had a one-time encounter with a phrenologist rather than an ongoing relationship. Many phrenologists used the science to argue for the mental equality of the sexes while others found evidence of particular strength in faculties traditionally associated with women like morality, benevolence, and religiosity.

Female phrenologists like Lydia and Charlotte Fowler examined and lectured before audiences of women almost exclusively. We found no evidence for this claim. First, we explored the effect on local scalp curvature of underlying brain gyrification given that phrenology assumes a relationship between head and brain morphology.

We found that brain gyrification explains very little of the variance in local scalp curvature Fig. Despite the size of our sample and automation of our methods, we found no evidence to support phrenology's fundamental claim. The regions depicted on phrenological busts Fig. According to our results, a more accurate phrenological bust should be left blank since no regions on the head correlate with any of the faculties that we tested.

But even below the level of statistical significance, we found historic phrenological predictions to be uninsightful. For example, Fig. For the reckless, zealous or simply curious reader, we include the remaining unthresholded z-statistic maps none statistically significant in the Supplementary Materials Supplementary Figure 3 to Supplementary Figure We did not analyse the relationship between lifestyle measures and brain morphology, since many such relationships are known and uncontroversial within 21st century neuroscience Grogan et al.

What is peculiar about phrenology is its emphasis on the outer head i. The strengths of our approach are the automation of head measurements from MRI data and number of subjects studied. Because the analysis methods were automated, the number of subjects studied could easily number in the thousands.

By contrast, although phrenologists had access to quantitative tools like the measuring tape and caliper, and some attempt was even made to automate measurements as evidenced by the psychograph Fig.

Reference materials including phrenology charts and Fowler heads Fig. Therefore it might be objected that we should have used a more recent ontology. One can readily find examples of 19th century faculties in the neuroimaging literature, albeit under different names Table 2. We were also interested in grounding our study in Victorian concepts, despite an emphasis on 21st century methods. The lifestyle features that we selected also ranged over a wide number of behavioural and cognitive domains e.

So regardless of ontology, we hope to have covered many topics of interest. Examples of nineteenth-century phrenology faculties in modern neuroimaging studies of the brain.

Adapted from Poldrack, As to the objection that phrenology was already a known dead-end scientifically, and that its claims did not need to be tested rigorously, it is indeed hard to find a time in history when phrenology was not seriously criticised. Not only did the reviewer take issue with the use of palpation as an indirect method for measuring the brain and its mental faculties, but he also objected to the idea the brain might be composed of multiple specialised components, writing the following Gordon, : :.

We mention this to highlight the importance of empiricism and of testing improbable sounding theories. We would argue that phrenology's claim, that the shape of the head might reflect brain function, is not a priori incoherent.

Even in the healthy population, adequate childhood nutrition might result both in increased intelligence scores and in parallel skull growth, such that one might detect a correlation between intelligence tests and local scalp curvature. The possibility of this outcome shows that the scalp-curvature hypothesis is not refutable by armchair methods alone but requires empirical testing. That said, we of course acknowledge that science cannot test all hypotheses, but rather, because of limited resources, scientists must choose assiduously between experiments Feyerabend, It would not have been realistic, or perhaps even ethical, to acquire MRI for thousands of subjects with the purpose of testing a long-abandoned theory.

However, one of many benefits of big data projects like the UK Biobank is that they provide resources for answering questions that might otherwise have remained untested, or even, because of limited resources, untestable.

Although written in a light-hearted spirit, this study demonstrates the feasibility of applying to cranial data the standard methods of neuroimaging like registration, normalisation, random field theory, and mass univariate analysis. One potential application of these methods would be the clinical treatment of craniosynostosis.

In extreme craniosynostosis cases, paediatric surgeons will separate the fused bones in a baby's head to increase the size of the cranial vault, thereby creating the necessary space for brain growth.

Incidentally, this sort of medical application is closer to the serious scientific and clinical motivation that originally animated the creation of the UK Biobank. In summary, we hope to have argued convincingly against the idea that local scalp curvature can be used to infer brain function in the healthy population. Given the thoroughness of this study, it is unlikely that more scalp data would yield significant effects.

Future work might focus on the inner rather than outer curvature of the skull, perhaps formalising a virtual method for creating endocasts, casts of fossilised skulls used to study the evolution of brains Buchholtz and Seyfarth, , Edinger, But we would advocate that future studies focus on the brain.

OPJ and SJ conceived of the study over pints at our local pub, the White Hart; all authors contributed to data analysis and writing. The authors affirm that the manuscript is an honest, accurate, and transparent account of the study being reported; that no important aspects of the study have been omitted; and that any discrepancies from the study as planned have been explained.

We are grateful to the UK Biobank for making the resource data available, and are extremely grateful to all UK Biobank study participants, who generously donated their time to make this resource possible. The following is the supplementary data related to this article:. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Sponsored Document from. Alfaro-Almagro , and S. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer.

Parker Jones: ku. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Associated Data Supplementary Materials Multimedia component 1. Abstract Phrenology was a nineteenth century endeavour to link personality traits with scalp morphology, which has been both influential and fiercely criticised, not least because of the assumption that scalp morphology can be informative of underlying brain function. Keywords: Phrenology, MRI. Introduction According to Franz Joseph Gall, the founder of phrenology, those of a mirthful disposition i.

Methods 2. Open in a separate window. Table 1 Faculties and associated Biobank lifestyle measures. Relating local scalp morphology to personal measures Starting with phrenology's claim that bumps on the head relate to individual traits, we used multivariate regression to search for associations between local scalp curvature and lifestyle measures extracted from the Biobank.

Relating scalp morphology to local brain morphology In order to test the second claim of phrenology, that bumps on the head should reflect the underlying shape of the cerebral cortex, we correlated each subject's local scalp curvature described above with a local index of brain gyrification projected onto the scalp.

Results The phrenological analyses produced no statistically significant or meaningful effects. Discussion The present study sought to test in the most exhaustive way currently possible the fundamental claim of phrenology: that measuring the contour of the head provides a reliable method for inferring mental capacities.

Table 2 Examples of nineteenth-century phrenology faculties in modern neuroimaging studies of the brain. Phrenological faculty Modern neuroimaging equivalent Associated regions References Impulse to propagation Amativeness Viewing of romantic lover vs. Contributors OPJ and SJ conceived of the study over pints at our local pub, the White Hart; all authors contributed to data analysis and writing. Ethical approval Not required. Transparency statement The authors affirm that the manuscript is an honest, accurate, and transparent account of the study being reported; that no important aspects of the study have been omitted; and that any discrepancies from the study as planned have been explained.

Appendix A. Supplementary data The following is the supplementary data related to this article: Multimedia component 1: Click here to view. References Alfaro-Almagro F. Image processing and quality control for the first 10, brain imaging datasets from UK Biobank. Aron A. Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love.

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