Who is that gentleman with his head divided into compartments? He’s a 19th-century phrenology chart, and deserves a closer look.

Phrenology held that all mental faculties occupied specific parts of the brain. A well-developed faculty made the skull bulge, a weak one did the opposite. Phrenologists would read people’s character by studying their heads, and tell them how to improve themselves by mental exercises that were supposed to grow different parts of the brain.

A case of mind over matter
Phrenology was a pseudoscience, of course, like alchemy or astrology. But the most interesting thing about it is how much it still managed to get right.

Phrenology pointed researchers in the correct direction with the idea that the brain is the organ of the mind – not an obvious concept at first. Its theory of localized functions also proved to be true, when a French surgeon demonstrated the existence of a cerebral speech center in 1861.

Much more recently, the idea that people can live better, happier lives by thinking in ways that actually do stimulate neurological growth has been confirmed.

Contrary to the traditional view that the adult brain is hardwired, research in neuroplasticity has shown that dedicated thinking alters the brain in ways that last. Stroke victims can learn to walk again. Dyslexics can learn to read. And well-directed psychotherapy produces beneficial changes, too; there are “before” and “after” PET scans that prove it.

Would modern neurology and psychology have developed as they have if phrenology had never existed? Probably, although no one can actually say for sure.