Uncovering Gage's Mind...
Do you remember that one friend in high school who took a trip abroad and when they came back, their entire personality had been altered due to that one vacation? Well, something of a similar sort happened with Phineas Gage, but to a much larger degree.
The Accident
By profession, Phineas Gage was a railroad foreman in the 1800s and is popular due to a disastrous accident that he met with. On the fateful day of September 13th, 1848, Gage was in Cavendish, Vermont, and due to the nature of his work, he was required to blast rocks to make a roadbed. To do this, he would require a tamping rod to push gunpowder deep within a rock. But due to oversight, the rod launched at him and shot through his left cheek, behind his left eye, and exited through the top of his skull. The momentum of the 6 kg heavy and 1.1 m long rod caused him to fall on his back, but strangely enough, he survived the mishap regardless of the hole that had just erupted in his brain and skull.
The physician, Dr. Edward Williams, who attended to Gage, recollected not being convinced of the story at first but later believing him as he saw a ‘teacupful’ of Gage’s brain fall on the floor as he vomited. Dr. Harlow took care of Gage thereafter. Although Gage was fully able to recognize Dr. Harlow and named quite a few of his friends, there had been enormous bleeding which led to an infection, leaving him in a semi-comatose state. Fortunately, he recovered within several weeks and felt healthy enough to reapply to his former job as a railroad foreman.
Aftermath
This would have seemed like the perfect ending to a tragic story, but it was not to be. From once being described as ‘efficient and capable’, his colleagues and contractors now said that he was ‘no longer Gage’. According to Dr. Harlow, Gage had become ‘fitful, irreverent, and indulging at times’. He had now become very disrespectful and unreliable, and his personality had shifted from one end of the spectrum to the other. Gage then moved to Chile in 1852 and took up the job of a stagecoach driver, and then moved to California to live with his mother and sister several years later. He then died of epileptic seizures due to an unknown illness in 1860.
Why Did His Personality Change?
No initiatives had been taken to understand the cause of Gage’s personality shift until many years later when his skull was unearthed and autopsies were performed. In 2004, computed tomography scans (CAT) were used to study his skull, and it was found that the portion of the brain that suffered injuries was the left frontal lobe, the part that is majorly responsible for a lot of social behavior. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was also used in 2012 to explain the cause of the personality change. After an investigation of the levels of white and grey matter in Gage’s brain, the study proposed that Gage lost about 11% of his white matter which could be compared to the loss of white matter due to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. So yet another possible explanation for his personality change was an onset of undiagnosed Alzheimer’s.
Conclusion
Just like these, there have been countless arguments to explain why Gage was ‘No longer Gage’, but brain structures differ from person to person, so no exact measurements can ever be obtained. It is also difficult to tell which of his brain tissues was damaged due to the rod and which one was damaged due to the infections that he sustained later. But despite this, we have come a long way in neuroscience and psychology, and after nearly 160 years, we are somewhat closer to obtaining the answer.
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