Most psychology students are familiar with Broca’s area — the brain area associated with speech production. It is named after a Parisian surgeon called Pierre Paul Broca, who is often regarded as the first person to link specific behaviours to specific brain areas. But he wasn’t.
In the early eighteenth century, the pseudoscience of phrenology proposed that bumps on the skull could predict mental traits, such as secretiveness, wit or hope. Phrenology was largely dismissed by the scientific community as a pseudoscience because there was no actual evidence for its claims.
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