THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYalways knew there was a difference between verbs and nouns, but once
somebody showed they were associated with activity in different brain
areas, well then we knew they were different “scientifically”.
Fodor could well be right that the allure of brain images is related to
our tendency to believe things more if they’re seen to be neuroscien-
tific or brain-based. In a 2007 study Deena Weisberg and her colleagues
at Yale found that scientifically naïve participants and neuroscience
students – but not neuroscience experts – were more satisfied by poor
explanations of psychological phenomena if those explanations were
accompanied by gratuitous neuroscience jargon.
The brain imaging field probably slumped to its nadir in 2009 when a
team of American psychologists, led by Ed Vul at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology, identified what they claimed was a series of serious
statistical errors in many of the most high profile, recently published
brain imaging studies in social neuroscience. These were studies that
had linked social emotions with brain activity and spawned a thousand
headlines in the process. Vul’s paper originally had the provocative
title: “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience” (later changed to a
Phrenology
Invented by the German anatomist Franz Josef Gall in the eight-
eenth century, phrenology was the study of the shape of the skull as
a means of discovering a person’s
underlying traits. Like modern-day
psychologists, the phrenologists
believed that the mind is rooted in
the brain, but contrary to contem-
porary views, they held that entire
personality traits and aptitudes are
localized to specific brain areas, as
betrayed by the pattern of bumps
on the skull. In the United States in
the nineteenth century, the Fowler
brothers – Orson and Lorenzo –
spawned an entire phrenological
industry, in the form of books,
magazines and phrenology
heads. The latter remain popular
ornaments to this day, many still
A nineteenth-century phrenological bearing the Fowler trademark.
chart of the human faculties.