ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most famous case of head injury known to psychology today, Phineas Gage was a well-liked, intelligent man who, as a result of a workplace accident, somehow survived an iron rod being launched through his skull in 1848. While the stories of his dramatic personality changes are plentiful, these tall tales may be quite exaggerated. Though Gage did indeed experience changes to his personality and mannerisms, there is more evidence in favor of his irritability being the direct result of frustration at not being able to do what he had been able to do prior to his injury. Previously an intelligent man who had pioneered the tamping iron that wounded him, Gage was no longer able to keep up with his job after the accident due to struggling with his cognitive abilities, and went on to do publicity tours, eventually becoming a stable-hand until his death several years later. The personality aspect is a quite popular focus of Gage’s experience, yet there is still no solid consensus on a single brain area in which personality is controlled. Instead, retrospective examinations of his friends’ and physicians’ testimonies focus more on executive functioning and regulation of behavior, both of which are now known to be commonly affected by frontal lobe damage. Additionally, Gage’s death, which arose from complications of post-injury seizure activity, has also become a well-studied artifact of brain injury. Many individuals who recover from traumatic injuries will also develop seizures and may have trouble concentrating, just as Gage did, providing us with a potential avenue for exploring epilepsy and cognitive disruptions in experimental models.
