Flight into Fancy: Poe’s Discovery of the Right Brain

"Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at," Edgar Allan Poe wrote in an 1836 review of Phrenology, and the Moral Influence of Phrenology. "It is no longer laughed at by men of common understanding. It has assumed the majesty of science; and, as a science, ranks among the most important which can engage the attention of thinking beings" (Essays and Reviews 329). Poe, of course, counted himself among these "thinking beings" and continued to be engaged by phrenology, which located various "faculties" such as "amativeness" and "cautiousness" in different parts of the brain

Faculties and Phrenology

This Reflection considers how the science of phrenology relates to the notion of faculty. It asks: why is phrenology so appealing? It illustrates this with reference to modern culture. Firstly, the Reflection argues, phrenology relies on an easy line of reasoning: moral and mental faculties are found in specific areas of the brain. The more persistently such faculties prevail, the bigger the respective part of the brain. Secondly, phrenology produces easy visible evidence. You can read the mental makeup of someone by looking and feeling the lumps in their head. The Reflection goes on to look at the history of phrenology and relate it to issues of race

When Heads Were Headlines

A history of phrenology in the United States. Theories of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Christoph Spurzheim. Visit of Johann Christoph Spurzheim to Boston for public lecture series. Death of Spurzheim in Boston. Activities of Orson Squire Fowler. Phrenological lecture tour of the Fowler brothers. Establishment of Fowlers & Wells publishing company. Fading of phrenology in the 20th century

History of Phrenology

Though phrenology is no longer considered a valid method of studying the brain, it did raise interesting questions that still help drive neuroscientific research today. This paper outlines the history of phrenology, and the contributions it made to the field of neuroscience

Law and Phrenology

As the intellectual credentials of American law become increasingly dubious, the question arises: how has this discipline been intellectually organized to sustain belief among its academic practitioners? This Commentary explores the nineteenth-century pseudo-science of phrenology as a way of gaining insight into the intellectual organization of American law. Although there are, obviously, significant differences, the parallels are at once striking and edifying. Both phrenology and law emerged as disciplinary knowledges through attempts to cast them in the form of sciences. In both cases, the sciences were aesthetically organized around a fundamental ontology of reifications and animisms -- faculties in the case of phrenology, doctrines and principles in the case of law. Both disciplines developed into extremely intricate productions of self-referential complexity. In both cases, the disciplinary edifice was maintained by disciplinary thinkers who sought confirming evidence of the truth (and value) of their enterprise and who went to great lengths to avoid disconfirming evidence. Finally, the surface plausibility of both disciplines was maintained through a tacit reliance on folk beliefs (folk-frames and folk-ontologies) that were recast in professionalized jargons. Both the similarities and the differences between phrenology and law lead to a fundamental question: does the discipline of law know anything, and if so, what

Students, the Net Generation and Digital Natives:Accounting for Educational Change

This chapter examines a number of different terms and popularized accounts of young people who are now at the stage in their lives of engaging in university education across the world. Three of the more common terms that have been used to describe this cohort of young people are the Net generation (Tapscott 1998, 2009), Digital Natives (Prensky 2001; 2001a: 2009) and Millennials (Howe and Strauss 2000; Oblinger & Oblinger 2005). This chapter critically examines the argument, common to writers using both terms: that the existence of an environment infused with digital and networked technologies, combined with an active engagement in these new technologies, leads directly to a sharp generational break. The chapter goes on to examine the determinist nature of the argument and the way this has been related to one particular pedagogical approach; collaborative learning. It examines the wider social and technological context and in particular the ideas of networked individualism and networked sociality. Finally the chapter concludes by examining which aspects of the Digital Native and Net Generation arguments are worth taking forward and by identifying those aspects of the arguments that need to be abandoned

Medical discourse and ideology in the Edinburgh Review: a Chaldean exemplar

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