Antonio comments on Cultish Countercultishness - Less Wrong

31 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 December 2007 12:53AM

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Comment author: Antonio 24 October 2011 12:23:25AM 5 points [-]

I know this one is very old, but it deserves an answer. Yes. Frenology. Some time ago, a bit before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, some fisiologists noticed that regular use of specific parts of the brain leads to a change (swelling, I think) of that part. A dead pianist would have a huger part associated with manual dexterity and rithm, for example. They also believed this change in the cerebral tissue was enough to affect the skull, so that they could tell a person's personality/habilities/preferences/etc by measuring the relative size of parts of their skulls.

And they were, as far as I know, very rational about it. Their experiments and bookkeeping are actually examples of excelence in those areas. It's just that the base theory was rubbish.