The curious case of Phineas Gage and the metal rod in his head.

A serious industrial accident that changed the personality of a young worker.

In the month of September 1848, the life of a young railroad foreman was turned upside down by a terrible industrial accident..

At the time, his job was to blow up rocks with explosives to allow the railroad tracks to pass, and he needed to place gunpowder and sand in a hole drilled in the rock.

Phineas Gage - a case study

Unfortunately, a procedural error caused a spark to ignite when this worker attempted to compact the powder placed in the cavity using a metal rod. The explosion of the mixture occurred just centimeters from the young man's face and, as a result, the one-meter long metal rod was blown out of the cavity, the metal rod, one meter long and about three centimeters in diameter, pierced the young man's skull. before landing more than twenty meters from where it was initially located.

Phineas Gagefor that was the worker's name, regained consciousness a few minutes later with a hole running diagonally from one of his cheeks to the top of his head, just above his forehead. Much of his frontal lobes of the brain had ceased to exist as such. However, Phineas Gage not only survived this experience, but was able to regain most of his mental abilities and went down in history as one of the most studied cases in the fields of psychology, medicine and neuroscience.

Dr. Harlow and the medical miracle

Most of what we know about Phineas Gage is what was documented about him by Dr. Harlow. Dr. Harlowthe physician who treated him. This physician was strongly impressed by the fact that Gage was conscious and able to speak at the time he entered his office, but he was more surprised that his patient recovered within a few months of his arrival, after a period of fevers and delirium.

Thus, after a mere 10 weeks, Gage's brain functions seemed to have recovered almost automatically, as if the brain's cellular tissues had been damaged.It was as if the brain's cellular tissues had been able to reorganize themselves to compensate for the absence of several cubic centimeters of frontal lobe. However, Dr. Harlow was struck by something else: although objectively the foreman did not appear to have significant intellectual or movement deficits, his personality seemed to have changed as a result of the accident. Phineas Gage was no longer quite the same.

The new Phineas Gage

When Gage returned to work on the job site, the measured and cordial worker that everyone knew had disappeared to give way to a person with a bad temper, easy to irritate, given to insults, prone to wastefulness and with a very short-sighted view of life.He was a person with a short-sighted, short-sighted, short-sighted, short-sighted view of life. He was, in general, an impatient and irreverent person, who was driven by whimsical desires and thought little of others.

He soon stopped working for the show and, a few months later, Phineas Gage went to work at the Barnum Museum, exhibiting himself next to the metal rod that had pierced his head. In the years that followed he lived in Chile, where he worked as a horse-drawn carriage driver, until he returned to the United States feeling deteriorated and somewhat ill. There he suffered his first epileptic seizures, which were to accompany him until his death in 1860..

Why is the case of Phineas Gage relevant?

This small historical episode is an obligatory stop in many university careers related to neurosciences and behavior because, in fact, it was one of the first well-documented examples in which it was seen how material changes in the brain modified not only cognitive abilities, but aspects of psychology that have traditionally been associated with the "soul", ie, the way of being and the essence of human beings..

There is a theory that Phineas Gage became another person not through a process of learning or self-reflection, but through a very specific accident that physically modified his brain. What was later ascertained may have been an example of the brain reorganizing itself to make up for the material shortcomings produced by the explosion from the more limited resources at its disposal, but the collateral effects of this were noted in aspects that were thought not to be so subject to the material world as, for example, memory.

In some ways, the metal rod accident served to point out the Biological foundations on which rather abstract psychological processes, such as the management of emotions and thesuch as emotion management and decision making. In addition, the Phineas Gage case also served to reinforce the hypothesis that different areas of the brain deal with different aspects of behavior.

Possible Prefrontal Syndrome?

It is now believed that Phineas Gage's personality change may actually be an example of Prefrontal Syndrome, originated by the altered functioning of the frontal lobes.. The frontal area of the brain plays an important role in linking present motivations to future goals, including the ability to place goals in the long term, the ability to forgo immediate rewards in favor of more ambitious projects, and the ability to take into account the consequences of one's actions on the people around us and society in general.

This would explain why the new behavioral style of the Phineas Cage who had suffered the accident with the metal bar resembled in some respects the behavioral repertoire of the Phineas Cage who had suffered the accident with the metal bar. some aspects to the repertoire of behaviors expected in someone with a psychopathic personality. psychopathic personality. Psychopaths also seem to show different dynamics of neuronal activation in the frontal lobes than the rest of the population, but in Gage's case this would be produced by the reorganization of neurons after the brain has been injured.

Another probable explanation for Phineas Gage's case

The idea that the brain injury was the fundamental cause of Phineas Gage's personality change is widespread, but there is also an alternative explanation: that the changes were due to the social impact of being disfigured.

As Zbigniew Kotowicz points out, it is very likely that at least part of his behavioral changes were due to the social impact of being seen by others as someone with a missing part of his brain. As always, it is difficult to disentangle the biological aspects from those of a social and cultural nature.In the end, Gage may have experienced what happened to Dr. Frankenstein's monster in Mary Shelley's novel: that it was society, rather than his own nature, that transformed him into a foreign body.