PROFILE BOOKS, NOVEMBER 2017Most of what we know about the human brain comes from trial and error, often more on the error side of that pairing. Some of the biggest breakthroughs in neuroscience have come from investigations no more sophisticated than shoving a finger inside a hole in someone’s head, hanging around Victorian insane asylums and, of course, lots of swearing.
By cataloging the functions and the structure of the brain, neuroscience has helped us to understand how and why we swear. It’s a two-way street, though: understanding how and why we swear has helped us to reverse-engineer the structure of the brain. Take one of the first and most famous case studies in the history of neuroscience, that of railway foreman Phineas Gage.
One late September afternoon in 1848, Phineas Gage was hard at work blasting rock faces apart, deep in the heart of Vermont. By all accounts he was hardworking and popular, a man who thrived in the American railroad boom of the 1840s. His bosses thought he was the most efficient and capable man in their employment and they described him in their ...
