Chapter 24 Chapter 24 From Phasing Skulls to Reading Handwriting

There are "sciences" that hold that a person's inner character can be seen from external phenomena, such as the shape of the skull, nose, hands, or the way the pen is written.Each of these so-called sciences has its own set of documents, as many as tens of thousands of volumes, and some can even be traced back to the ancient Greeks.But until recent years, no attempt has been made to put such studies on a sound scientific basis.Pseudoscientists such as these have emerged, especially in Europe, but their research has not yet attracted much interest or attention.Therefore, this book only gives a glimpse of four of this dubious discipline: phrenology, physiognomy, palmistry, and graphology.

Phrenology was first proposed around 1800 by the Austrian anatomist Francis Gall, and immediately aroused great public interest.Hundreds of associations for the study of phrenology sprang up throughout Europe, and later in England and the United States.Enthusiasts in various associations defended this learning with the zeal of religious belief.Numerous periodicals were published and soon disappeared.Among them, the Journal of Phrenology, published in Edinburgh, had the greatest influence.Published books and pamphlets can be counted in tons. Gore and his disciples argued that, in essence, human personality is composed of many independent, innate "brain faculties," each located in a part of the brain, occupying an area of The bigger it is, the stronger it is.Therefore, examining the hump of the skull can reveal a person's character.In the end, the Austrian government banned Gore's propaganda (because Gore's view that the human brain is closely related to character violates religious teachings), but he continued to spread his doctrine in Germany and France.Curiously, when he died in Paris in 1828, an autopsy found that his skull was twice as thick as that of an average person.This fact caused a lot of jokes.

Phrenology was widely accepted in the nineteenth century by some intellectuals, especially those inclined to the occult.Sherlock Holmes deduced from a large top hat that the person wearing it was "very intelligent", based on the prevailing opinion of phrenology at the time.Alfred Wallace, like Conan Doyle, became a spiritualist as well as a believer in phrenology.On one occasion he put a subject into a trance while he touched various parts of a model head used for phrenology studies.With each touch, the subject's facial expression responded to the bump on the skull.Wallace wrote that it was not telepathy, because on one occasion he thought he was touching one bump when in fact his fingers were pressing on another, and yet the patient responded correctly.

Walt Whitman was so proud that phrenology proved all his senses sound that he published a diagram of the skull of his head five times.is full of phrenological terminology.Critics were puzzled for years by lines like "Ah, adhesion—oh, the pulse of my life," until they discovered that "adhesion" refers to the phrenological faculty of one mind attracting another. solved the mystery.Whitman sometimes referred to "16" and "164" in some of his private notes.For example: "Always maintain a kind spirit and behavior toward 16. But don't pursue her again." Early critics, who did not believe Whitman was a homosexual, used these words to justify his interest in women.It was later discovered that 16 and 164 are two sections of a popular phrenology book, referring to the two senses of hope and longing.

As we all know, modern research on the human brain has completely overturned the old "sensual psychology".Each sensory center is concentrated in a local location.For example, the brain at the back of the head has to do with vision, not in the way Gall taught it.It has to do with love for children.The pseudoscience of phrenology, apart from the occasional wandering fortune-teller talking about it, has almost completely disappeared. Physiognomy, the technique of judging personality based on facial features, can be traced back to an article in the name of Aristotle.As to whether the countenance expresses character, or as Shakespeare wrote, "There is no way of seeing the inner thoughts in the countenance," a question from the Greeks to the present that still divides opinion.The number of works on physiognomy is very large and contradictory, and the works that appeared in the Renaissance period have the greatest influence.Numerous studies by qualified psychologists in recent years have drawn negative conclusions.The shape of the nose, ears, and lips, the color of the hair and eyes, the texture of the skin, and other features do not appear to correlate with mental characteristics.

However, certain exceptions must be acknowledged.Sometimes, a specific facial expression can reflect a long-term mental state, and can leave traces in the form of lines or fixed muscle features. For example, if a person has been depressed for 30 years, his expression may appear gloomy to people.Or if a person loves to laugh, there may be obvious happy lines around his eyes.Sociologists have pointed out that certain social conventions, such as the belief that redheads are short-tempered and that a protruding chin is a sign of determination, may produce those corresponding traits in some children.If everyone says redheads have tantrums, it might be promoting his tantrums.In this regard, however, not much scientific exploration has been carried out.

The theory that criminals have fixed "characteristics" and that their facial features and physical features are different from ordinary people is a quasi-scientific research topic proposed by the Italian mystic Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909) .His statistical methods were so poor that the study was soon forgotten.But in recent years, its basic concepts have been picked up again by Professor Ernest Hooton of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University.In a study done in the 1930s, Dr. Hooton found that all body types were associated with certain types of crime.For example, bandits typically have bushy beards, diffuse pigment in their irises, large earlobes, and 6 other physical traits.Hooton, however, should not be seen as a paranoid; his research was done so carefully that he was not of that type, but his conclusions were not accepted by most of his colleagues, who felt that his research lacked proper means of control.

Mention must also be made in this connection of Dr. William Sheldon's work on the correlation of mental characteristics with body types (endomorph, ectomorph, and mesomorph).His work has aroused great controversy, and this book is inconvenient to describe it in detail.Likewise, this book cannot discuss in detail the Zurich psychiatrist Leo de Sondy's "Sundy Test," invented by him.In this experiment, he gave patients a set of pictures of people with eight main types of psychopaths.He asked the patient to pick out the most and least disgusting photos, and then carefully analyzed his choices.The theory behind the trial was that patients generally liked pictures of psychopaths who had facial expressions and muscle tension similar to their own.If the reader is interested, an explanation of all this can be found in Susan Derry's 1949 book, An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of the Sundy Experiment.The book's authors teach the technique at the New School for Sociology in Manhattan.

Palmistry is another ancient science.There are a lot of books in this area.Palmistry is generally divided into two branches, one is physiognomy surgery, which calculates the future fate according to the lines of the palm of the hand; the other is palmistry, which explains the character of a person according to the shape of the fingers, the size of the "finger peak" and other characteristics of the hand .There used to be a kind of foot physiognomy in China, inferring fate and explaining character according to the lines on the feet and the size of the toes, but this technique has not been developed in Western tea houses.A number of recent books have attempted to base palmistry on a scientific basis, notably The Human Hand by Charlotte Wolfe of the University of London in 1943 and several widely circulated books by Joseph Ranald book of.Their research is quite interesting, but it is based on a very unreliable empirical method.

Graphology, the study of character interpretation in terms of handwriting, originated in Italy around the beginning of the seventeenth century.It became popular in the middle of the nineteenth century.At that time, Father Jean-Hippolyte Michon in Paris developed a set of "pen symbols", which he believed were related to specific spiritual characteristics.Substantial subsequent studies, mainly by Europeans, have invalidated most of the priest's "symbols".But there are also indications that general characteristics of handwriting, or "gestalt psychology" characteristics, are statistically related to certain personalities.For example, a lazy and sloppy person will not suddenly write vigorously when he picks up a pen; a neat and orderly person will not be very sloppy when writing a formal letter.A person who is extremely conservative will not write strange letters.

One cannot absolutely rule out (especially from a psychological depth) the possibility that there is some subtle, unconscious connection between certain mental states and the way they write.For example, a deeply religious mystic may, at the end of his writing, raise the last stroke of the cursive to an unusual height, thereby unconsciously revealing spiritual longing.From this point of view, handwriting is also regarded as "expressive behavior" and has some connection with character, like talking, walking gestures, facial expressions, smiling or shaking hands.However, how many connections there are, or which kind of connections, although there have been many influential research results in recent years, the arguments are still not satisfactory. If readers are interested in exploring this hazy boundary in psychology, Clara Roman's "Graphology: Keys to Interpreting Character" published in 1952 is a good reference book.Mrs. Roman is a scholar of the Hungarian school of graphography, which she has taught for many years at the New School of Sociology.Her book, like most works on graphology, makes little contribution to careful experimental verification, but it does provide a good overview of recent research and is an excellent overview of modern graphological theory.Mention should also be made of the book A Diagram of the Unconscious, published in 1948, which emphasizes a Freudian approach to graphology, by Professor Werner Wolf of Bard College. One of the greatest difficulties in the various forms of character study is that a truly precise method has not yet been devised for determining whether an analysis applies to a particular individual.For example, leaving wide margins on all four sides of a written letter is considered a sign of "generosity."Isn't there some people who disagree?People are generous in some ways and not in others.It is too vague to use any empirical method to test character. Even good friends can disagree greatly about whether a character is in line with their own wishes.The same is true for the characteristics of handwriting.If someone tells you that you have those traits, you can always find them if you look for them, especially if you trust that the graphologist who performed the analysis was an expert and infallible. There is an easy way to test any handwriting analysis expert, amateur or professional.Get samples of their handwriting from 20 friends of the same sex and age, and give them to a graphologist.Then give the results of the twenty analyzes he made to another person who is familiar with the 20 (handwriting samples are not handed in).Ask him to pair each analysis with 20 friends.If he is facing each other at will, the law of probability will make him face one person.If his grades are high, say 10 or more matches, you can consider the handwriting expert's ability to be objectively justified.If his grades are poor, that's a strong indication that the opposite is the case. A small number of psychologists have done this kind of experiment in the past, and it usually shows that handwriting experts are very poor.As long as no character analyst has been able to achieve better results in such tests, their research work will remain at the level of common sense in orthodox psychology.The fact that millions of people have been impressed with the accuracy of phrenology's interpretations reminds one of how easy it is to make a personality analysis fit the person being analyzed, provided you know for certain that the person is accurate! Closely related to modern graphology are many behavioral testing methods developed by psychoanalysts.Jung and his students focused on the analysis of pencil scribbles, and analytical works are full of reports of this aspect.Roughly similar to this is the "drawing people experiment".Give the patient a blank sheet of paper.Ask him to draw a person.The experimenter carefully analyzed this sketch and believed that it provided valuable clues about the abnormality of the patient's personality.Karen Meshowell of King's Hospital in Brooklyn County, who has done a lot of pioneering research on this test, and teaches a course on it at the New School of Sociology. The "composition test" was invented by Dr. Henry Walterger in Germany following similar ideas.He gave the patient a set of squares, with some meaningless symbols on each square, and asked him to draw 8 pictures to reflect these symbols.A recent book on this technique is Experimenting with Composition by Marianne Kingate of the University of Chicago.Naturally, pencil drawings and watercolors have long been used by psychiatrists and analysts for diagnostic purposes.Works on the analysis of works of art drawn by neurotic children are particularly extensive. These experimental forms of expressive behavior (new forms are emerging year by year) are still in the experimental stage.It may be decades before a decent test method for testing these experiments is invented.Before that, it would be unwise to arbitrarily label them science or pseudoscience.