On September 13, 1848, a 25-year-old railroad worker named Phineas Gage triggered an explosion that propelled a 3 foot 7 inch iron rod straight through his skull, destroying a good portion of his brain. Luckily, the iron missed the critical blood vessels and parts of the brain necessary for survival, but the injury spurred dramatic behavioral changes and made Gage’s accident one of the most important contributions to modern neurology.
“This was the first case when doctors made a definite connection between an injury to the brain and a change in personality,” says Malcolm Macmillan, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Melbourne in Australia and an expert on Gage. Linking the damage in Gage’s prefrontal cortex to his sudden erratic behavior was one of the first clues that the prefrontal cortex was responsible for personality expression and decision making.
Because Gage made public appearances and worked after ...
