By Dara Barnwell
Anyone who has had a psychology class has probably heard of Phineas Gage. He made a huge contribution to neuroscience and psychology; not by being an educated scientist but by merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In 1848 Phineas Gage was an average hard working man, strong and handsome, he worked hard as a supervisor of a crew that blasted rock to make way for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad. They had hired Gage’s crew that fall to clear away some tough black rock near Cavendish, Vermont, and Gage was the best foreman around.
Part of his job was to sprinkle gun powder down into blasting holes and then tamping the powder down with a long iron rod. This had to be done very gently so as not to cause a spark or premature blast.
When that was done a crewman came along and added sand or clay into the hole to confine the blast to a small space.
Gage was very good at his job. He was an even tempered man who treated his crew fairly and did his best to keep them safe in a very dangerous job.
He was so good in fact that he had his own iron tamping rod made. It was sleek like a javelin, it weighed 13¼ pounds and stretched 3 feet 7 inches long. (Gage stood 5-foot-6.) At its widest, the rod had a diameter of 1¼ inches, although the last foot—the part Gage held near his head when tamping—tapered to a point.
On September 13, 1848 Gage and his crew were working hard to clear the black rock. Gage was busy tamping when a loud sound from his crew (they were unloading some rock from a cart) distracted him. He turned his head to see what was going on while still tamping. This minor mistake changed his life forever.
The iron rod rubbed against some rock, causing a spark. The spark caused the gun powder to blast causing the iron rod to explode upward – right through Gage’s skull. One report described it as thus: The iron entered Gage’s head point-first, striking below the left cheekbone. It destroyed an upper molar, passed behind his left eye, and tore into the underbelly of his brain’s left frontal lobe. It then plowed through the top of his skull, exiting near the midline, just behind where his hairline started.
It then whistled through the air and stuck point first into the ground where it stood streaked with Gage’s blood and brain.
Amazingly, Gage never lost consciousness! He laid on the ground a few moments twitching and bleeding until he felt he could get up. He walked to an oxcart and someone grabbed the reins and rushed him into town.
When they got to the hotel where Gage was staying, he sat down in a chair on the front porch and chatted amicably with a passerby. When the doctor came, Gage looked at him with his one good eye and joked, “Here’s business enough for you.”
Gage wasn’t wrong. The doctor later on described Gage’s injuries as upturned skull protruding from Gage’s scalp.
The doctor patched up Gage as best he could. Gage would be blind in his left eye the rest of his life but that was the least of his worries.
Several months later, Gage began to display distressing personality changes. Observations were made by Dr. John Martyn Harlow, the doctor who treated him for a few months afterward. Gage’s friends found him “no longer Gage,” Harlow wrote. He could not stick to plans, uttered “the grossest profanity” and showed “little deference for his fellows.” The changes were so drastic that the railroad company refused to take him back. So Gage went to work at a stable in New Hampshire, drove coaches in Chile and eventually joined relatives in San Francisco, where he died in May 1860, at age 36, after a series of seizures. At the request of the medical community his body was exhumed and his brain was studied.
Gage’s case went down into the annals of psychology and neuroscience as a perfect example of the relationship between perrsonality and the brain.
Eerie Rift 