Fiona Ball
1. In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle developed his laws of association in order to explain the manner in which thoughts are formed. Since he believed that all knowledge came from examining the physical world, thoughts necessarily were initiated through experiences, which left imprints on the mind. These repeated experiences would then cause patterns, so that if one thing was experienced, the mind then thought of the thing which often happened after or with it. After Aristotle stated this idea, one of the first Western philosophers to express it again was Thomas Hobbes, having been influenced by Aristotle. In his 1650 book Human Nature, he discussed the nature of perceptions and thoughts, and presented the idea that the mind goes…show more content… Franz Josef Gall’s early anatomical work, as well as his development of phrenology, gave some superficial support for brain localization. Gall found support for Thomas Willis’s anatomical observations of the brain, and also made more discoveries in regards to the white and gray matter within the brain. These two different substances seemed to at least superficially suggest different functions in the areas with these different kinds of matter. In his anatomical studies of the brain, Gall also found that commissures connect the two sides of the brain, suggesting that the two sides may have information that must be sent to the other, which implies that there may be functions that differ between the two halves. He also found that the hemispheres are connected to the spine separately, and on opposite sides. This discovery gave a reasoning behind the pre-existing knowledge that when one’s brain is injured on one side, motor or sensory problems can occur on the other side of the body by suggesting that each side of the brain controls different and opposite sides of the body. These hemispherical differences support a broader idea of localization. Gall’s observations of people’s skulls in order to develop phrenology also gave evidence for localization. By observing noticeable differences in skull shape, Gall was able to note what he thought were physiological differences in the brain, which he then compared to the possibly abnormal attributes they possessed. While these cranial differences were probably mostly not related to actual brain differences, some observations, such as the thickness at the base of the skull indicating a more prominent cerebellum, may have been