phrenology

noun

1. (countable, historical, uncountable)The pseudoscience which studies the relationships between a person's character and the morphology (structure) of the skull.

   “Phrenology involves feeling the bumps in the skull to determine an individual's psychological attributes.”

   “MR. BURNS: Who could forget such a monstrous visage? She has the sloping brow and cranial bumpage of the career criminal. MR. SMITHERS: Uh, sir, phrenology was dismissed as quackery 160 years ago.”

   “Phrenology was the practice of correlating bumps on a skull with mental powers and attributes of character.”

   “One significance weakness of phrenology in the eyes of most anatomists, as Anne Harrington has shown, was that the brain comprised two structurally identical cerebral hemispheres, separated by a longitudinal fissure, whereas phrenologists held that the material sub-stratum of various mental faculties was located in only one hemisphere, and not its twin.”