Tag Archives: Phineas Gage

Slate: Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient

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Slate Magazine has just published a piece on infamous brain damage survivor Phineas Gage. To tell the story of Gage and his continuing importance in the history of psychology the article draws heavily on the work of Malcolm Macmillan. As the Slate article recounts,

Most of us first encountered Gage in a neuroscience or psychology course, and the lesson of his story was both straightforward and stark: The frontal lobes house our highest faculties; they’re the essence of our humanity, the physical incarnation of our highest cognitive powers. So when Gage’s frontal lobes got pulped, he transformed from a clean-cut, virtuous foreman into a dirty, scary, sociopathic drifter. Simple as that. This story has had a huge influence on the scientific and popular understanding of the brain. Most uncomfortably, it implies that whenever people suffer grave damage to the frontal lobes—as soldiers might, or victims of strokes or Alzheimer’s disease—something essentially human can vanish.

Recent historical work, however, suggests that much of the canonical Gage story is hogwash, a mélange of scientific prejudice, artistic license, and outright fabrication. In truth each generation seems to remake Gage in its own image, and we know very few hard facts about his post-accident life and behavior. Some scientists now even argue that, far from turning toward the dark side, Gage recovered after his accident and resumed something like a normal life—a possibility that, if true, could transform our understanding of the brain’s ability to heal itself.

The full article can be read online here and Macmillan’s website on Gage can now be found hosted on the Center for the History of Psychology site.

Phineas Gage Website!

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A webpage providing information on Phineas Gage has recently relaunched. The Phineas Gage Information Page was created by Malcolm Macmillan at the University of Melbourne but is now maintained by The Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron.

Included on the site are sections dedicated to Phineas Gage’s story, the detailing of damage done to Gage’s skull, the indirect contribution Phineas Gage’s case provided brain surgery, and a section providing references for further reading on Phineas Gage.

Explore the entire site here.

The Everlasting Myths of Gage & Genovese

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The September 2012 issue of gradPSYCH magazine, published by the American Psychological Association, features an article entitled Psychology’s Tall Tales. The article describes two of the most persistent myths in psychology; those of Phineas Gage and Kitty Genovese (right). The true stories of what happened to Gage and Genovese have been discussed on AHP previously (here and here). In short, the personality changes experienced by Gage following his accident were not as severe as generally reported and during Genovese’s attack bystanders did in fact intervene in various ways.

In addition to recounting the details of these often perpetuated myths, the gradPSYCH article also point to an interesting audio source on the Genovese case. An interview with Genovese’s girlfriend at the time of her murder, Mary Ann Zielonko, can be heard on the Sound Portraits website. Interestingly, the interview begins by retelling the myth of Genovese’s attack. Click here to listen the full audio of that interview.

Mapping Phineas Gage’s Brain (150+ Years Later)

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The Guardian‘s Science Section has a fascinating piece on a recent attempt by researchers to reconstruct the damage done to Phineas Gage’s brain, who famously survived an 1848 accident in which a tamping iron was shot through his head. As the article describes, research on the damage done to Gage’s brain is part of the larger Human Connectome Project that aims to map all the connections in the human brain.

But how does one reconstruct the connectome of someone who died more than 150 years ago, and whose brain no longer even exists? Van Horn and his colleagues used high-resolution CT scans of Gage’s skull, from a 2004 study that digitally reconstructed the trajectory of the iron rod as it passed through his brain, and examined the data again to re-estimate its path as accurately as possible.

They then selected structural MRI and DTI data from 110 healthy people from the LONI Image Data Archive. All of these data came from men aged between 25 (Gage’s age at the time of his accident) and 36 (the age at which he died). The researchers combined these data to produce a generalized map of the long-range connections in the human brain, and used computational modelling to project the passage of the tamping iron onto it.

The computation model of the passage of the tamping iron through Gage’s brain is shown in the video above. While this model shows severe, widespread damage to Gage’s brain, it has been known for a number of years that there is little evidence in the historical record of the purported profound personality changes Gage experienced post-accident. Ultimately, what this kind of research tells us about Gage’s experience after the accident is unclear. (Find out more about Gage’s accident and his life afterward in an interview with Gage’s biographer Malcolm Macmillan on the This Week in the History of Psychology Podcast series.)

Read the full Guardian article online here and the original PLoS ONE article whose research is described in the Guardian piece here.

Special Issue: History of Cerebral Localization

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The history of cerebral localization is the focus of the most recent issue of the Journal of the History of Neurosciences. An outgrowth of a World Federation of Neurology Research Group on the History of the Neurosciences Fall 2005 symposium, the issue explores the history of cerebral localization from antiquity up to the twentieth century.

Articles in this issue include:

“Cerebral Localization in Antiquity” by F. Clifford Rose

“Cerebral Localization in the Eighteenth Century – An Overview” by Axel Karenberg, Institute for the History of Medicine and Medical Ethics, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Continue reading Special Issue: History of Cerebral Localization →

More History of Psychology on Flickr

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Following up on yesterday’s post regarding the “discovery” of the only known image of Phineas Gage on the online photo site Flickr:

Jack and Beverly Wilgus, the owners of the Gage photo, have a number of other Psychology-related items in their online album: “Flint the Mesmerist” and his hynotized daughter (the Wilgus’ also host a Flint the Mesmerist website complete with links to posters you can be – see poster 1 and poster 2), a couple of images of phrenology heads (image 1, image 2), and a physniotrace with explanation of the photographic process (which is particularly interesting in relation to Objectivity and its descriptions of various imaging technologies).

Of course, there are a vast number of history of psychology related images both on Flickr and other online image databases. For instance, as AHP announced earlier this year, the Archives for the History of American Psychology continues to post images of their apparatus collection, media collection, books and manuscripts collection, events at the archives, and images taking you inside the archives.

Here’s a selection of other “Psychology on Flickr” images you might enjoy on a Friday afternoon:

Continue reading More History of Psychology on Flickr →

Face of Phineas Gage Revealed

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Almost a full century and a half after his death, the face of one of the most famous cases in Psychology’s history has been revealed. As the well-known story goes, Phineas Gage was a railway worker who survived having a tamping iron that was 3.8 feet in length enter under his left eye and exit from the back of his skull in 1848 (for more info, see here). Until now, our only “image” of Gage has been his skull and the infamous tamping iron (pictured right).

It turns out Gage’s image has been right under our noses in the collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus, photograph collectors from Maryland. As the two describe on their recently launched website, “Meet Phineas Gage“, the image has been in their collection for 30 years but had been identified as a whaler holding a harpoon – until a comment on the online photo site Flicr questionned the accuracy of the caption. As the Wilgus’ explain:

Continue reading Face of Phineas Gage Revealed →

“The Psychologist” on Scientific Myths

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The British Psychological Society’s flagship journal, The Psychologist, has published two items related to the history of psychology in its latest issue, and it has kindly made them freely available on its website.

The first is an article by Australian psychologist Malcolm Macmillan on the mythology surrounding the case of Phineas Gage, the Vermont railroad worker who had a tamping iron blasted through his head in 1848 and lived to tell about it.

Macmillan’s research on the case was published in An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage (MIT, 2002), and he has been interviewed for my podcast series, “This Week in the History of Psychology” (Sept. 11-17). Through extensive examination of the primary documents in the case, MacMillan has discovered that the Gage case has been distorted repeatedly through the century-and-a-half since, to suit the neuropsychological theories of the person writing the account. Continue reading “The Psychologist” on Scientific Myths →