In 1848, Phineas Gage was the foreman of a prison work gang that was blasting the path for a railroad bed in Vermont. After the crew drilled blast holes, it was Gage’s job to add gunpowder and tamp it down, which he did with a thirteen-pound, nearly four-foot-long iron spike.
On September 13 of that year, Gage tamped a little too hard.
The gunpowder exploded, blasting the tamping rod back toward Gage. According to the accident report, “the iron entered on the side of his face, shattering the upper jaw, and passing back of the left eye, and out at the top of the head,” from whence the spike continued, landing nearly eighty feet away.
Gage remained conscious, and after sitting upright during the mile-long cart ride into town, he regaled a gathered crowd with the story of his injury. The first physician on the scene recalled that Gage “got up and vomited; the effort of vomiting pressed out about half a teacupful of the brain, which fell upon the floor.”
Amazingly, despite almost completely ineffectual treatment and subsequent brain infection, Gage recovered.
But while Gage’s physical recovery was total, Dr. John Harlow describes changes in Gage’s personality: Before the accident, Gage was hardworking, responsible, “a great favorite” with the men in his charge, and regarded by his employers as “the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ.” After the accident, Harlow writes that, “The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed.”
Gage became impulsive and irrational. Harlow wrote, “In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was no longer Gage.”
This raises the existential question of what is Gage? Is he, or are we, defined by our thoughts and actions, or is there an inviolable piece of Gage—his soul, perhaps—that was unchanged by the accident?
You can find a wonderful, if graphic, animation of Gage’s injury in a post by “Mo” by Googling “Gage neurophilosophy.”
Eye Hack: Ebbinghaus Illusion
The center circles are exactly the same size. Really, they are.
