PHRENOLOGY

noun. a theory of personality developed in the 18th and 19th centuries by an Austrian philosopher and anatomist named Johann Kaspar Spurzheim and a German doctor named Franz Josef Gall . It postulated that particular skills or characteristics are represented by particular regions of the brain: The size of these brain regions determines the extent of the correlating ability or characteristic. Proponents of the theory argued that the size of such locales might be implied by bumps and hollows on the cranial surface, based upon the observation that the contours of the brain align with the cranial contours. Even though incorrect in most respects, the theory proposed the concept of localization of function.