My world spans no farther than the diameter of my skull
Mircea Cărtărescu
Man fled from his head like a convict breaking out of prison
Georges Bataille
Phrenology, like all pseudosciences, is a fascinating field. Essentially, it claims that we can discern a person’s character by examining the peculiarities of their skull. Developed in the early 19th century by Franz Joseph Gall, it enjoyed immense popular success in Europe throughout the first half of that century. Later, emerging research gradually discredited it and labeled it a pseudoscience. In fact, it was the first discipline to receive that label. Phrenologists divided the skull into distinct, well‑defined regions whose size, shape, and protuberances could supposedly reveal an individual’s predisposition. Naturally, this theory was soon used with a considerable lack of empathy and for discriminatory purposes. Alongside craniometry and physiognomy, phrenology contributed to the spread of eugenics—an aberration that inspired genocides and was deeply rooted in late‑19th‑century social Darwinism. Yet, through its very rejection, it helped introduce an ethical dimension to the study of the brain.
Not everything about phrenology is false. Its view of a brain divided into zones, each associated with different mental faculties, is absolutely correct. Thus, the ink‑outlined drawings phrenologists made on the skull’s exterior were, in essence, the maps of thought.
The origin of all architecture is not the cave or the hut, but the skull. The cranial vault is the architectural ground zero: the primal home, the house of all possible thoughts, sensations, experiences, imaginings, dreams, labyrinths, the unknown, all worlds, the house of being and of our dead. It is the quintessential dwelling to which we can always return. Samuel Beckett called it “the last shelter” in one of his poems.
In skulls—as in most vaults—the exterior and interior are separated by an almost ontological distance. In his book Being a Skull, art historian Georges Didi‑Huberman explores this divide through three distinct approaches to studying the skull: anatomist Paul Richer’s (the exterior, being a box), Leonardo da Vinci’s (the interior, being an onion), and Dürer’s (geometry, being a snail). From these, he reflects, among other things, on how the human body’s grand machine of sensations and experiences is in contact with a bony wall that it neither sees, feels, nor knows anything about. A tactile blindness that obscures the hidden traces the dura mater meninges leave on the inner face of the cranial bone—a sort of rock art of thought.
John Berger was among the first visitors to the Paleolithic Cave of Chauvet. He said that, for the Cro‑Magnon, all the animals he wanted to paint “were inside the rock, and he, with red pigment on his finger, could persuade them to come out onto the rocky surface, onto its membrane, to brush against it and be imbued with its scents. (…) These rock paintings were made where they are so they could exist in darkness. They were made for darkness. They were hidden in darkness so that what they embodied would survive all that is visible.” The legendary Japanese tattoo artist Horiyoshi III said that tattoos should always remain hidden.
Landscapes of the Brain (1990), one of the most beautiful works by artist Giuseppe Penone—whom Didi‑Huberman dedicates the second part of his book—uses the frottage technique to capture tactile images from the skull’s inner wall. Graphite dust applied there reveals a subtle fossil network of tiny vessels, nerves, and microscopic reliefs, born from the interaction between the pulsating brain and the plasticity of cranial bone. This happens in all caves and houses: life and ghosts seep into walls, but only art or mediums can see and make them appear.
If the cranial vault is the great palace of intimacy, trepanation is the ultimate act of desecration. The earliest trepanned skulls discovered date to around 7,000 years ago. Experts say it’s hard to know why, but these cranial perforations appear to have been part of some ritual. Trepanation turns the skull into a dark chamber where the constellations of profaned intimacy are projected, like in a soul‑planetarium. Entering the great trepanned dome of the Pantheon of Agrippa in Rome is an experience of atavistic brutality, in which, after an initial blindness, the inner reliefs of the dome’s face emerge, bearing the traces of its history and use. The pivotal moment in the movie The Truman Show is the trepanation from inside—the protagonist drilling through the great cranial vault that contains his deceptive world, carving an escape hatch.
Exploiting the brain’s tactile blindness, much of its surgery today is still performed via open‑skull procedures. In many cases this reduces risk and allows the surgeon to interact with the awake patient. Yet there is something perverse and unbearable about opening a skull—especially with its owner conscious. In 1939, Hungarian journalist and writer Frigyes Karinthy published A Journey Round My Skull. The book is like a report in which he narrates, in first person, the discovery and subsequent open‑skull surgery of a brain tumor he was diagnosed with.
Karinthy was a prolific, meticulous, affable, sarcastic, and egocentric writer, very popular in his country. In the first part of the book, he talks about his symptoms with nonchalance, frankness, and even humor, showing no fear of their potential gravity. In the second, perhaps the more compelling part, he recounts the operation. Lying face‑down on an operating table, awake, skull open, brain exposed, he tries to grasp what is happening outside, what the prestigious and distant Dr. Olivecrona is doing to his mind’s violated flesh. How is it possible that, being awake and thinking, he feels nothing while someone wanders through the factory of all his sensations? “No, my brain doesn’t hurt. I wish it did. This is much more terrible than if it hurt. Because if it hurt, it would mean that I’m alive. It’s impossible to continue living and thinking like this, impossible and illicit.” Karinthy feels both the dread of having died and a profound shame at the exhibition of his brain—exposing all the labyrinths of his mind, the brazen opening of the thunderbox of his innermost self.
If the skull, considered from within, conceals a blind enigma, from the outside and separated from the body it has often been gazed upon as a fetish, a reliquary of the fossilized soul of some privileged owner. The skulls of Schiller, Mozart, Goya, and Pancho Villa were stolen. Did the thieves think that, by possessing the house, they would access the treasures of its former rooms? The earliest known pyramid‑like structures consisted of stacked human skulls—a primordial architecture of trophies. Mexican writer Sergio González Rodríguez explores this in El hombre sin cabeza. The book, both fascinating and terrible, maps decapitation as a symbolic act of extreme terror. Decapitation is the quintessential revolutionary act: removing power in order to seize it. The skull is where kings’ crowns rest. The beheading of a monarch is the absolute castration of power. To hold the bleeding head separated from the body of the State constitutes an irreversible declaration of revolution and, above all, a dreadful act of deterrence. And horror, to intimidate, must be constantly remembered. Hence the impaled skulls at city gates, the burial mounds, the triumphant and mocking display of enemies’ heads, ISIS’s televised beheadings, or the macabre performances with severed heads by Mexican drug cartel hitmen. González Rodríguez researched these cathartic acts in depth in his country: “decapitating is an act of fundamentalist fury, and whoever carries it out wants to show others their utter contempt for any order or norms.”
To decapitate is to eliminate any possibility of order, of meaning. Bataille knew it, and so named his strange sect Acéphale. Its emblem—a naked man with no head, holding a skull between his legs. In his left hand, a dagger; in his right, a flaming heart. Aristotle believed thought resided in the heart. Leonardo knew that was false—“a cage can never be a home”—but was convinced that tears travel from the heart to the eye sockets. It came late to discover the rooms of empathy (it couldn’t have been otherwise in a house inhabited by irreconcilable twins). Rizzolatti discovered mirror neurons in 1996.
“Upon meeting someone I have often wanted to enter their skull and find within their visual field, their ‘bitter’, their ‘yellow’, their memories, trying them all on as if they were someone else’s clothes. Feeling their toothache, loving their wife, running my fingers through their hair with that personal gesture of theirs. Dying their death,” writes Mircea Cărtărescu in The Right Wing, the third part of the monumental Blinding. “What is it like to be another?” In his seminal 1974 article What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, philosopher Thomas Nagel addressed the impossibility of truly experiencing another’s feelings. Only one’s self knows what it is to be oneself. One can attempt to imagine what it is like to be a bat, but one will always be limited by one’s own mind’s resources and experiences—resources that bear no resemblance to those of a bat’s mind, any other animal’s, or any other human’s. Empathy is a well-intentioned feeling but an imaginative one: we cannot truly take another’s place. Each skull is an impenetrable bunker. The labyrinths, gorges, excavations it houses contain utterly unique worlds that we project outward through the magic lantern of life.
Frenchman Louis Darget believed in the 19th century that such a projection of thought occurred through radiations—like light—capable of impressing a photograph plate placed on the forehead. Darget’s images are blurry and undefined but astonishingly beautiful. He carefully labeled them with the person’s name and the thought they corresponded to (the cane, planet and satellite, anger, an eagle, the torpedo‑boat…). If the mind is radiation emitted by the skull, one could imagine that we live in an atmosphere filled with others’ thoughts. Perhaps Darget had read Charles Babbage and knew of his concept of atmosphere as a repository of imperceptible sound vibrations containing all that has been spoken. Babbage and Darget were, in a way, precursors of the collective brain concept some theorists applied to the Internet with the advent of Web 2.0—or the social web—and the rise of the prosumer. But if the skulls of Babbage and Darget’s atmospheric brains consisted only of that terracentric mental construct we call the celestial vault, the skull of the World Wide Brain would be the membrane of the satellites feeding it. The advent of artificial intelligences has transcended the organic concept of the brain into a numerical one. Do algorithms then need a skull? What might it be? Only they can tell us. The real question about AIs is not whether they think better or faster than we do, but whether they think things we cannot think, says Kevin Kelly. Meanwhile, let us learn from octopuses. And let us respect them.
