In the early 1800's, German physician, Franz Joseph Gall spent a lot of time running his fingers over the scalps of strangers. He wasn't a hairdresser, he wasn't a masseuse, he wasn't
just like a big fan of heads. He was a phrenologist, he was the first phrenologist. Gall believed that a persons personality was linked to their skull morphology, that its bumps and ridges
indicated aspects of their character. Amazingly this " science" actually caught on, was widely practiced for decades, and Gall became something of a celebrity.
Well, with a head like his, one can see how he might have been a little bit fixated with skull shape.
Eventually, phrenology was dismissed as a cult pseudoscience because it turns out your cranial contours tell us exactly nothing about what's happening inside the brain.
And yet! Gall was actually on to something big, something that we knew nothing about. Remember, at this point we were just starting to get consensus that the brain was the source
of self and not like the soul or the heart or whatever. His lasting and correct proposition was that different parts of the brain control specific aspects of our behavior.
Like we talked about last time, there is a strong link between biological activity and psychological events. But in addition to the interplay of chemicals like neurotransmitters
and hormones, a lot of this has to do with that localized parts of the brain have specific functions, like vision, movement, memory, speech, and even facial recognition. Function,
in other words, is localized. If you could stimulate different parts of my brain in any way you wanted to– and if
