Victorian Pseudosciences: Brain Personality Maps
in 19th-century England, scientists were figuring out that certain parts of our brains were connected with certain parts of our bodies- but they came up with some terrible and misleading ideas...
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A lot of exciting neuroscience was happening in 19th-century England. Victorian scientists were figuring out that certain parts of our brains are connected with certain parts of our bodies, like different senses or muscles. But mixed in with all the legitimate research was some pseudoscience, or misleading ideas that spread without rigorous scientific backing. Like one theory from the Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall, who thought that character traits, like religiousness or curiosity, were also linked to specific brain regions. This theory became the basis of phrenology, a field of study that claimed that you could determine someone’s personality by the shape of their skull. Phrenologists believed that all human brains were made up of many distinct ...
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A lot of exciting neuroscience was happening in 19th-century England. Victorian scientists were figuring out that certain parts of our brains are connected with certain parts of our bodies, like different senses or muscles. But mixed in with all the legitimate research was some pseudoscience, or misleading ideas that spread without rigorous scientific backing. Like one theory from the Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall, who thought that character traits, like religiousness or curiosity, were also linked to specific brain regions. This theory became the basis of phrenology, a field of study that claimed that you could determine someone’s personality by the shape of their skull. Phrenologists believed that all human brains were made up of many distinct ...
