Revisiting the contributions of The New Phrenology to the brain–mind debate.

Abstract

William Uttal’s The New Phrenology (2001), although published more than a decade ago, remains a fundamental essay concerning the conceptual and methodological shortcomings of the scientific endeavors favoring the concept of localization (as opposed to universalization) of psychological functions in the brain. The book conveys a strong message in which the author explains that the efforts made to localize psychological entities in the brain are flawed for two main reasons: One is associated with the fact that there is no conclusive evidence that our mind can be divided into single modules, and the other is related to the difficulties that bedevil the possible mapping of mental functions and brain regions, especially due to the nonlinear interactions between both. By revisiting this book, the intention was to highlight the author’s position concerning the philosophical, conceptual, and technical issues underlying the associations between brain-related physiological signals and psychological faculties.

Politics and Biology: The Dark Tetrad and Darkness at Noon

“…Be that as it may, there's a long tradition of parsing the relations between politics (as in the psychology of living within the polis) and biology. Presumed correlational/causal biological factors include bodily fluids such as humors (c. Alcmaeon of Croton, Hippocrates in the 5 th -4 th centuries BCE); secretions of endocrine glands and neuronal synapses, and more recently discovered interactions with the gut microbioeme (Weir, 2018); systems of brain and nervous system function varying in the import of specific neural areas, processes, and structures (Kalat, 2018); invasive effects on brain tissue from lobotomies, lobectomies, and direct cranial electromagnetic stimulation (Sachdev & Chen, 2009); external physical appearance whether from skull size and shape (e.g., the phrenology of Francis Gall (Pereira, 2017)), facial structure described in the history of physiognomy (cf. Boys-Stones et al, 2007), the body mass index and musculature as in William Sheldon's constitutional psychology (Klineberg, 1941), facial expressions linked to emotions, e.g., Paul Ekman's Facial Action Coding Systems (Ekman, 1994); and the evolutionary theories stemming from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace varying on where on a biopsychosocial continuumincluding political aspects -are adaptive phenomena defined as increasing the probability of one's physical survival and passing on one's own genes to one's own descendants and having them expressed, presumably on a continuum of consanguinity from first degree relatives through conspecifics (Buss, 2020).…”