Updates from Derren Brown and the Enigma Crew

Over at the Science museum is a new exhibit on phrenology. It features a set of 60 tiny heads in a presentation case:

“Phrenologists believed that the shape and size of various areas of the brain (and therefore the overlying skull) determined personality. Gall and Spurzheim eventually disagreed and went on to promote rival systems of phrenology. These heads are numbered according to Spurzheim’s classification. The heads may have been used to teach phrenology but were probably made as a general reference collection.”

It is now a defunct field of study, once considered a science, in which the personality traits of a person were determined by “reading” bumps and fissures in the skull. Developed by German physician Franz Joseph Gall in 1796, the discipline was very popular in the 19th century. In 1843, François Magendie referred to phrenology as “a pseudo-science of the present day.” Phrenological thinking was, however, influential in 19th-century psychiatry and modern neuroscience.

In the Victorian age, phrenology as a psychology was taken seriously and permeated the literature and novels of the day. Many prominent public figures such as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher actively promoted phrenology as a source of psychological insight and personal growth. British Prime Minister Lloyd George was known to have a keen interest in the subject, once contriving a meeting with C.P. Snow after noticing that the author had “an interestingly shaped head.”

Thousands of people consulted phrenologists to get advice in various matters, such as hiring personnel or finding suitable marriage partners. As such, phrenology as a brain science waned but developed into the pop psychology of the 19th century and broadly speaking functioned in society similar to how psychoanalysis permeated social thought and relationships a century later.

Phrenology was practiced by some scientists promoting racist ideologies, including Nazism. They used phrenological claims, among other biological evidence, as a scientific basis for Aryan racial superiority.

Prof. Bouts, a Roman Catholic priest, became the main promoter of renewed 20th-century interest in phrenology and psychognomy in Belgium. He was also active in Brazil and Canada, where he founded institutes for characterology. Bouts developed a teleological and orthogenetical view on a perfecting evolution, from the paleo-encephalical skull shapes of prehistoric man, which he considered still prevalent in criminals and savages, towards a higher form of mankind. Bouts died on March 7, 1999, after which his work has been continued by the Dutch foundation PPP (Per Pulchritudinem in Pulchritudine), operated by Anette Müller, one of Bouts’ students.

Empirical refutation induced most scientists to abandon phrenology as a science by the early 20th century. For example, various cases were observed of clearly aggressive persons displaying a well-developed “benevolent organ”, findings that contradicted the logic of the discipline. With advances in the studies of psychology and psychiatry, many scientists became skeptical of the claim that human character can be determined by simple, external measures.

Science Museum