True story: doctors once insisted that personality traits can be read by the bumps on your head. You read that correctly. “Phrenology” emerged some two hundred years ago and lasted an astonishing hundred years or so before someone said, “Really? Bumps on the head?” I can imagine some upstart bashing his mentor on the head with a hammer in the effort to make him more docile. The science behind bumpology was that personality traits, associated as they are with differing regions of the brain, vary in size from individual to individual, causing undulations on the skull. The originators of skullology were utterly convincing in their description of organs associated with murder, and theft, and so forth. Thank heavens we’ve moved on from believing that bumps on your head, or lines on your palm, have any meaning. Because, really, lines on your palm?
phrenology
