An Empirical, 21st Century Evaluation of Phrenology

The old technique of judging people by examining their head bumps gets a new looking-at, in this study: “An Empirical, 21st Century Evaluation of Phrenology,” Oiwi Parker Jones, Fidel Alfaro-Almagro, and Saad Jbabdi, bioRxiv 243089, 2018. The authors, at the University of Oxford, UK, explain: Phrenology was a nineteenth century endeavour to link personality traits […]

Phrenology Favorites

Here are some images from the heyday of phrenology. Most of them come from the book The Illustrated Self-instructor in Phrenology and Physiology: With One Hundred Engravings, and a Chart of the Character, written by Orson Squire Fowler and Lorenzo Niles Fowler, published in 1857. Like bumps on a head, these images almost speak for […]