We all know that brain is one of the most important human organs. Now imagine someone whose brain has been penetrated by a 1.1 m long iron bar weighting 6 kg …OUCH!! That sounds horrible!
This unfortunate man is named Phineas Gage. Gage used to be a normal railroad worker, but one day at work in 1848 he made a mistake with his explosives which shot an iron bar towards his head. The iron bar entered his left cheek and pierced through his brain and exited through his skull. With an injury this gruesome and severe you probably think that there is no way he’d survive. That was what people around him thought too: they prepared a coffin for Gage. But amazingly, he survived this terrible accident. In fact, most of his intellectual functions were quite normal because most of his brain was actually undamaged. The primary site of injury was his prefrontal cortex, which resulted in drastic personality change in Gage.
Phineas Gage skull via Wikipedia Commons from uploader Roy Baty
Prefrontal cortex is in the anterior part of the brain. Different parts of the brain have different functions and this particular portion of the brain is important for planning, attention, and behaving appropriately in society. Because of damage to the prefrontal cortex, Gage changed to a different person. Before the injury Gage was hardworking, responsible, and popular among his co-workers. After the injury, however, he was stubborn, impatient, violent, and non-compliant. He lacked self-control and even molested children!Because of his obnoxious personality after the injury, people felt he was “no longer Gage”
Here is a video account of Gage’s story:
from youtube user Jpick311
Gage’s story is a great tragedy but it provided strong evidence that prefrontal cortex of the brain is involved in personality and contributed a lot to brain research.
-Stella Meng
