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Gall's Theory Paper

Decent Essays

Daniel L. Schacter says that psychology is known as the scientific study of a person’s mind, such as their experiences, thoughts, and feelings, and their behavior, which are the individual’s observable actions. Franz Joseph Gall, a French physician, believed that a person’s brain was linked to their mind by the size instead of by the glands. Gall developed a theory called phrenology stating that certain mental abilities or characteristics in a human being are set in a specific location of the brain (Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert, Daniel M. Wegner, Matthew K. Nock, 2014). This theory also showed how you could link a bump on a person’s skull to a certain characteristic of their personality (Kendra Cherry, 2014). For example, if one person has more mathematical ability or tends to be more persevering than another person, the part of their brain that those qualities are located will …show more content…

Gall began studies with van Swieten when he moved from Strasbourg to Vienna. After getting his doctorate in 1785 in Vienna, Gall began his own successful medical practices and soon developed this theory of phrenology in 1800 with the help of his research assistant, Johann Christoph Spurzheim (Dennis T. Cheng, 2014).
Franz Gall first started observing his friends in his teenage years and began to make connections due to their abilities and appearances (Dennis T. Cheng, 2014). Gall’s method to his research and investigations were mostly empirical as he studied the heads of a vastly wide range of people such as talented men, geniuses, criminals, and even a variety of animals (Madison Bentley, 1916). At one point, Gall examined the heads of pickpockets and suggested that since most of them had bumps above their ears on their skull that it was connected to their tendency of stealing and deceiving (Kendra Cherry,

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