Phineas Gage Case Study

The Return of Phineas Gage: Clues About the Brain from the Skull of a Famous Patient
“On 13 September 1848, Phineas P. Gage, a 25-year-old construction foreman for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad in New England, became the victim of a bizarre incident.” (Damasio, Grabowski, Frank, Galaburda, & Damasio, 1994). Due to an unfortunate accident while working on the railroad, a tamping iron over 3 and a half feet long blasted through Phineas Gage’s cheek, frontal lobe and out the top of his skull. The marvel behind this incident that made Gage so famous was that he could still talk, walk, and function, but not as the man he used to be.
Once recovered, Phineas Gage was still as smart as he was before. He could do everything physically, and mostly emotionally as someone who had no accident involving a rod passing through their skull. What was different about Gage was his ability to conform to the social norm. He spoke in a manner that would offend most people around him. His sense of responsibility was gone as well. He was not able to be trusted with commitments. “In the words of his physician, “the equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculty and animal

The general consensus between professionals is that both lobes of the brain work independently and control different parts of the body and have different functions. This study and others have concluded that when it comes to the prefrontal cortex, both sides work together not separate. “This assignment also agrees with the idea that non-brain-damaged individuals the separate frontal regions are interconnected and act cooperatively to support reasoning and decision making.” (Damasio, Grabowski, Frank, Galaburda, & Damasio,