Phrenology and Aphasia: Controversies and Contributions

1610 Words4 Pages

Phrenology was controversial for a couple reasons. One reason was the criticism from Pierre Flourens who used the ablation method and his findings were contradictory to phrenologists. Another controversial reason, according to the reading was that the selection of the different “faculties” was totally random. Trying to explain human differences in intelligence and personality by a restricted number of those faculties was not a valid method. Some positive consequences from Franz Gall’s idea of phrenology were that it kind of opened the door to looking at individual differences and studying personality. Another positive consequence was that phrenology supports that the brain is the organ of the mind and that mental processes originate in the brain and should be studied and to see if parts of the brain perform different functions. 2. Aphasia is the loss of ability to understand speech or produce speech and is caused from brain damage in the left hemisphere. Paul Broca found that loss of speech was due to damage in the left frontal lobe. Broca …show more content…

The way they constructed their studies was very different. Titchner required much more participation from the person/subject than Wundt did. Titchner would actually have the subjects describe their sensations, not their perceptions. Contrary to that, Wundt just had subjects respond with a response such as “yes” or “no” based on if they perceived the stimulus or if they did not. Another big difference between them was that Titchner thought that experimentation is how we figure out mental functioning and Wundt agreed with that for simple mental functions only but he did not agree with experimentation for higher mental

More about Phrenology and Aphasia: Controversies and Contributions

Open Document