Informal Speech

 

You may not have noticed, but our understanding of how the brain and the mind are buddies has come a long way. Way back in the day, Hippocrates, A famous physician in ancient Greece said, "Hey, the mind lived in the brain!" But then, Aristotle, who was his philosophical rival, thought, "Nah, you wrong, it Definity lives around in the heart, that's where you feel love!" Now, don't get me wrong, we still use the heart as a symbol for love, (unless you’re weird and use the brain as a symbol) but when it comes to science, our brains shine in the spotlight. Yep, as you probably guessed it's your brain that’s calling the shots when you fall in love. Back in the early 1800s, there was this German dude named Franz Gall who came up with a pretty wild idea called phrenology. He thought that by feeling the bumps on your head, he could figure out how big your brain was and what kind of smarts and personality traits you had hiding up there. Believe it or not, this phrenology stuff got pretty popular! There were like 29 phrenology clubs, and these "phrenologists" even hopped on boats to North America to give people skull readings. Now, here's the juicy part: Mark Twain, a really funny author and humorist, decided to play a little trick. He used a fake name and had one of these phrenologists check out his head. The guy said Twain had a hole in his head where humor should be! that's not even the best part though, three months later, when Twain went back (this time using his real name), suddenly, that hole was gone, and instead, he had the biggest bump of humor you could imagine. Phrenology had its moment in the spotlight, but eventually, people realized how big of a hoax it was. Nowadays, we remember it as a lesson in why we need to use our brains for critical thinking and rely on scientific analysis.