Well… stick with me here, this is just a devil’s advocate hypothetical.
Your hands are your primary method of interacting with the world. The creases, callouses, and other incidental features are reflections of the ways you most frequently use them.
Obviously you can’t divine the future, but you can gather information about a person. I dare say you could devise experiments to detect correlations between certain features of the hands, and features of the person: their profession, hobbies, grooming habits, clumsiness, etc.
I think a sincere scientific study could identify several hand features with moderately predictive correlations.
You’re right in that you could learn about someone based on their hands. It’s the subjective nature of the predictions that make palm reading unscientific. There have been studies to show that certain health issues manifest in our skin. Palm reading isn’t focused solely on those issues though. It tries to predict all kinds of things (wealth, relationships, misfortune, etc.) How would you create a control group for a study like that?
Well it’s not just health issues, there’s the arrangement and depth of the creases, callouses, tan lines and stains, cuts and scrapes. If you can map those broadly to character traits (rough and calloused hands imply hard work and industriousness, lots of little injuries imply absent-mindedness, etc), then you can use those character traits to predict the answers to some questions. An absent-minded person is more likely to meet with small misfortunes, for instance.
Combine that with whatever the subject’s questions are, and a bit of basic psychology.
I see what you’re saying, and I’m not saying it can’t be useful or even helpful to individuals at times, just that it’s not scientific. It extends outside of what can be tested reliably.
Well… stick with me here, this is just a devil’s advocate hypothetical.
Your hands are your primary method of interacting with the world. The creases, callouses, and other incidental features are reflections of the ways you most frequently use them.
Obviously you can’t divine the future, but you can gather information about a person. I dare say you could devise experiments to detect correlations between certain features of the hands, and features of the person: their profession, hobbies, grooming habits, clumsiness, etc.
I think a sincere scientific study could identify several hand features with moderately predictive correlations.
You’re right in that you could learn about someone based on their hands. It’s the subjective nature of the predictions that make palm reading unscientific. There have been studies to show that certain health issues manifest in our skin. Palm reading isn’t focused solely on those issues though. It tries to predict all kinds of things (wealth, relationships, misfortune, etc.) How would you create a control group for a study like that?
Well it’s not just health issues, there’s the arrangement and depth of the creases, callouses, tan lines and stains, cuts and scrapes. If you can map those broadly to character traits (rough and calloused hands imply hard work and industriousness, lots of little injuries imply absent-mindedness, etc), then you can use those character traits to predict the answers to some questions. An absent-minded person is more likely to meet with small misfortunes, for instance.
Combine that with whatever the subject’s questions are, and a bit of basic psychology.
I see what you’re saying, and I’m not saying it can’t be useful or even helpful to individuals at times, just that it’s not scientific. It extends outside of what can be tested reliably.