Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [63]
Physiognomy had no influence on psychology, but it prepared the way for a related theory that did, namely, phrenology, the doctrine that the contours of the skull are determined by the development of specific areas of the brain and therefore are indicative of character and mental abilities.
The chief proponent of the theory was Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), a doctor and neurophysiologist born in Germany and trained in Vienna, where he received his medical degree in 1785.6 Gall, whose small, petulant features seemed bunched low in his face—his numerous eminent patients apparently did not believe in physiognomy—was a chronic nonconformist, ever on the outs with authority, vehement in controversy, given to blatant womanizing, and so unabashedly greedy that, defying convention, he charged admission to his scientific demonstrations.
For all that, he was a first-rate brain anatomist who, by means of his own technique of dissection, first showed that the two halves of the brain are connected by stalks of white matter (the “commissures”); that the fibers of the spinal cord cross over when connecting to the lower brain (with the result that sensations from one side of the body reach the brain on the opposite side); and that the larger the amount of cortex—gray matter on the surface of the brain—a species possesses, the greater its intelligence.
These contributions by Gall became, and still are, part of standard neurological knowledge, but they deeply displeased the ecclesiastical authorities and Emperor Francis I because they attributed the higher mental processes of human beings to the developed brain rather than to an incorporeal soul or mind. In 1801 the Emperor forbade Gall to give further lectures on the grounds that they led to materialism, immorality, and atheism. After repeatedly appealing to the Emperor to lift the ban, to no avail, in 1807 Gall quit Vienna for Paris, where, though Napoleon sought to restrict his influence and his ideas were rejected by the Institut de France, he remained for the rest of his life.
Gall’s contributions to the knowledge of brain structure and its relationship to intelligence should have won him a respected place in the history of psychology, but he is best known for, and usually judged by, the theory he called “cranioscopy,” which became popularly known as phrenology.
When Gall first realized that human intelligence is superior to that of animals because of the greater development of the human cortex, it occurred to him that, similarly, differences among human beings in intelligence and personality might be due to measurable differences in individual cortical development. This would explain something that had puzzled him for many years. As a schoolboy, and again as a medical student, he had been irked that some of his schoolfellows, though not as bright as he, got better grades because they were better memorizers— and, mystifyingly, all had large, bulging eyes. Gall now guessed this must mean that the area of cortex just behind the eyes was the seat of verbal memory, and that in people who have excellent memories the area is unusually developed and tends to push the eyes forward.
If so, might not every higher faculty be embodied in a particular area or “organ” of the cerebral cortex? Might there not be an organ, for instance, that generates “combativeness,” another that produces “benevolence,” and so on? Gall was familiar with the several dozen “mental faculties” propounded by Thomas Reid, the Scottish associationist; perhaps each faculty resided in a particular cortical area that was unusually developed in people who possessed that faculty in unusual degree.
He could hardly open up people’s skulls to test his theory, and X-rays had not yet been discovered, but Gall came up with a convenient new hypothesis. Just as the eyes of those with good memories were pushed forward, so the skull probably protruded somewhat over any unusually developed area. And, mirabile dictu, when he began