REVELATIONS IN SCIENCE: Is It Worth Getting Bumps on the Head
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Pseudoscience is not always the brainchild of a fame-hungry madman, a deceitful fraud, or a greedy charlatan. It can just as easily be the creation of a decent and talented scholar who sincerely wishes to push the boundaries of human knowledge, works hard, and makes interesting generalizations — but lacks the critical rigor to properly test and evaluate their own ideas.
Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) was a distinguished scientist credited with several important discoveries. He was the first to observe that the larger the cerebral hemispheres in a given animal species, the more intelligent that species tends to be.
He was also the first among scientists to assert clearly that human passions originate in the brain, not in the heart or liver, as had been believed before him. And yet, Gall’s name is most often associated not with these achievements but with the immensely popular 19th-century pseudoscience of phrenology. But does everyone still remember what that is?
BUG-EYED SCIENCE
T
he idea that struck Gall was based on seemingly real observations — he noticed that several of his classmates who had excellent memory also happened to have bulging eyes. A bit later, while studying the shape of people’s heads, he discovered peculiar bumps behind the ears of some pickpockets he had examined.
Building on the accurate notion that our thoughts and behaviors originate in the brain, Gall made a plausible assumption: different areas of the brain are developed to varying degrees in different people, and this could be determined by the shape of the skull — the brain’s casing. He paid particular attention to bumpy skulls, naturally concluding that a brain area under such a bump must be enlarged, pressing against the skull to make room for itself.
He named his new science «cranioscopy» (from kranion, Greek for skull). Gall began collecting skulls, studying their individual features, and gradually mapping out zones on the skull corresponding to various psychological traits: sensuality, cunning, compassion, cruelty, vanity, wit, willpower, and love for children — 27 zones at first, later expanded to 39.
THE THORNY PATH OF A PIONEER
A brilliant speaker, Gall began giving lectures about his findings, drawing packed crowds — including Vienna’s most influential figures. But his claim that human mental traits stemmed from the shape of the skull rather than the immortal soul outraged the Church. In early 1802, the Austrian Empire banned him from public speaking.
Gall traveled across Europe (notably impressing Goethe, who reportedly examined and felt his own skull in the mirror multiple times after Gall’s visit to Weimar). Eventually, Gall decided to settle in France, where even prominent scientists such as Georges Cuvier initially welcomed his theories.
However, France was no longer a republic — it had become an empire. And emperors, like all autocrats, believe they have no flaws. Gall, in turn, publicly declared that Napoleon’s skull revealed a practical mind but one unsuited to philosophical thinking.
Napoleon responded with a characteristically practical measure. When the question arose in 1808 of admitting Gall to the French Academy, he remarked, «Why do we need a German’s research? Don’t we have enough scholars of our own?» Naturally, Gall was never elected.
Interestingly, much later, on Saint Helena, Napoleon listed this incident among his achievements — evidently, he remembered it well…
A CHANGE OF NAME
Gall, together with his devoted student Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, continued to develop their theories and published several books that did not go unnoticed. It was either Spurzheim or another follower of the new theory, Thomas Foster, who came up with a new name for it — and so cranioscopy became phrenology (from the Greek word phren, meaning mind, thought, or intellect).
Gall died in 1828 and was buried in a tightly sealed coffin — without his head. He had bequeathed it to his colleagues for scientific study. Likewise, when Spurzheim died in 1832 while on a lecture tour in the United States, he too donated his skull to science; it is still kept at Harvard Medical School. They genuinely believed in their doctrine and, as you can see, were willing to make sacrifices to prove its truth.
A SURGE OF INTEREST ACROSS THE OCEAN
In the United States, the promotion of this new science was wildly successful, and interest in it skyrocketed. Much of phrenology’s boom can be attributed to the brothers Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, who approached it with classic American business savvy, turning it into a thriving commercial venture.
They sold specialized tools for skull measurement, published practical phrenology manuals, and delivered hugely popular public lectures that gained the movement new adherents — and earned the Fowlers a tidy fortune (not to mention generous fees from private consultations).
Soon, traveling phrenologists were crisscrossing the country, offering affordable readings about the hidden truths revealed by people’s skulls. Mass-produced porcelain heads with labeled phrenological zones hit the market — buy one and examine yourself. (They can still be found at antique auctions today.) After the Fowlers’ lecture tour across Europe, phrenology gained traction there as well, remaining fashionable throughout the 19th century and, to a lesser extent, into the 20th.
A FORAY INTO THE ARTS
Proving phrenology’s popularity is easy — many writers made space for it in their works, and not just in passing. Mark Twain recounted two visits to phrenologists: the first found a dent where the “bump of humor” should have been, while the second detected a bulge the size of Everest (the first phrenologist didn’t know Twain was a famous humorist — the second one did).
Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, held phrenology in high regard and used its findings in his investigations — and, according to Doyle, always with success. Jane Eyre, in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, also consulted a phrenologist to divine her future. References to phrenology abound in other literary works as well.
In Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, there’s a line suggesting that the unevenness of Dr. Werner’s skull «would have astonished a phrenologist with its strange combination of opposing traits». In urging Anna Kern to leave her husband and come to him in Mikhaylovskoye, Pushkin pointed out that she possessed a well-developed «organ of flight» — zone XIII according to Gall, a bump between the bridge of the nose and the center of the forehead.
In Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Bazarov’s father, a physician by trade, keeps a plaster head marked with phrenological zones in his office. There’s also a satirical take — the play The Craniosopher, or the Phrenologist by Kozma Prutkov. In it, characters trying to win the favor of their beloved’s father, a professional phrenologist, take hammers to their own heads, raising bumps in the «right» places.
OPPONENTS AND CRITICS
Was there any scientific criticism of phrenology during Gall’s lifetime — not from clerics or an irate emperor, but from serious scholars? Yes, there certainly was. The eminent French physiologist Marie Jean Pierre Flourens criticized phrenology harshly, often crossing the boundaries of acceptable scientific discourse (in his writings, he openly mocked Gall and even claimed he was mentally unwell).
Flourens removed portions of the brains of lab animals and showed that when certain areas were excised, others could partially compensate for the lost function. Today, we know that Gall wasn’t entirely wrong — as early as 1825, Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud had localized the speech center in the brain’s frontal lobe. But it was Flourens who was tasked with reviewing Gall’s work, and to Napoleon’s great satisfaction (he had ordered the biased examination), this ensured Gall would never be admitted to the Academy.
Was that entirely fair? Perhaps not — there were indeed many objections to Gall’s work, and his theory often failed to match observable reality. But in the early 19th century, Gall openly disregarded one field that had yet to fully develop — mathematical statistics.
Gall habitually drew sweeping conclusions from one or two vivid examples: he found a bump above the ear of a student who liked to torture animals and of a pharmacist who had become an executioner, and he declared this area the center of destructiveness. The fact that this pattern wasn’t found in many others didn’t interest him — he would explain that the trait had been «suppressed» by other brain regions, or he would simply disregard contradictory findings.
Remember the old «proof» that all odd numbers are prime? 3 is prime, 5 and 7 are prime, 9 — an experimental error, 11 and 13 are prime — and no need to check further. Gall’s logic worked much the same way.
TIME PUTS EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE
For a long time, this didn’t dampen phrenology’s popularity among the general public. Even in the 20th century, a device called the psychograph was invented — it resembled a hairdryer and was said to assess a person’s abilities by reading the contours of their skull. At the 1938 «Century of Progress» Chicago World’s Fair, the psychograph reportedly generated over $200,000 in revenue — a sum that, adjusted for inflation, would be roughly ten times greater today.
Did the psychograph deliver such accurate readings that everyone rushed to try it? The explanation is simpler: the operators were helped by the Forer effect — the tendency for people to believe vague and general personality descriptions apply specifically to them. It’s the same cognitive bias that makes us trust horoscopes, regardless of which zodiac sign the reading is actually meant for.
But scientific methods of analyzing data were becoming more precise and rigorous. Eventually, an overwhelming amount of evidence showed that phrenological predictions had about as much validity as fortune-telling with cards or palm readings.
Could this just be the opinion of a hardened skeptic? Absolutely not. In 2017, researchers at the University of Oxford used high-resolution MRI scans to establish a definitive conclusion: personality traits and mental abilities have no connection whatsoever to bumps or indentations on the skull. This was verified using cutting-edge mathematical techniques — and challenging this conclusion, based on what we now know, is simply a waste of time.
LET’S BE FAIR
Still, it’s important to be cautious when labeling phrenology a pseudoscience — even though that is, without doubt, what it is. The founders of phrenology weren’t lying; they were sincerely mistaken. They fell victim to flawed reasoning, making serious generalizations based on random coincidences that were never supported by rigorous statistical verification.
We should not forget the contributions of Gall and Spurzheim. Thanks to their work, phrenology was the first to clearly proclaim the brain as the seat of mental activity (not for nothing did a Berlin medal minted in Gall’s honor read: «He found the instrument of the soul») and laid the groundwork for important sciences such as anthropometry and cytoarchitectonics.
Yes, phrenology was enthusiastically adopted by the Nazis. Yes, the vile slave-owner Calvin Candie in Django Unchained used phrenology to «prove» racial inequality. But is it really phrenology’s fault? Unfortunately, even completely accurate and internally consistent sciences can be twisted to serve evil purposes.
And ill-informed writers and carnival charlatans can vulgarize not only a flawed idea like phrenology, but also legitimate sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology — just give them the chance! As for phrenology, over a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes asked: «Can you tell how much money is in a safe and in what denominations, just by feeling the outside?»
Perhaps you should think about that too…
LITERATURE
- T. Carroll. Phrenology. In The Skeptic’s Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions. Moscow: Williams Publishing House, 2005, 672 pp.
- Hunt. The Story of Psychology / Translated from English by A. V. Alexandrova. Moscow: AST Moscow Publishing, 2009, 863 pp.
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