Phines Gage

As history and reality there was a man called Phineas Gage who was born on 1823 and died on 1860. He was an American railroad construction foreman who is known and remembered for his incredible survival of an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior, effects so profound that friends saw him as if Phineas was not there anymore and they thought they lost him. The resulting explosion propelled the fourteen pound iron rod straight into the air with the force of cannon, causing it to pass through Gage’s skull in the process. It entered through the bottom of his left cheekbone and exited through the top of his head, then continued to fly in an arc across the sky, landing almost 100 feet behind him. It was determined that damage occurred to Gage’s skull in three places: There is a relatively small area under the cheek bone where the tamping iron first impacted, the orbital bone behind the eye socket, and very large hole where the iron rod emerged.  We learned that there still exist contradictory as Mr. Dougherty told us that there is not a right and complete conclusion about where the damage exactly happen in his brain. It is certain that it passed through the frontal cortex and white matter, but it has not been determined with certainty whether the lesion involved both frontal lobes or was limited only to the left side. In any case, the damage caused by the accident was roughly equivalent to a frontal lobotomy. Today, Gage’s skull and the tamping rod which damaged it are on permanent display at Harvard’s Count Way Library of Medicine. Before Gage’s brain injury, the frontal lobes were largely thought to have little role in behavior.

 

Lateralization: the tendency for certain processes to be more highly developed on one side of the brain than the other, such as development of spatial and musical thoughts in the right hemisphere and verbal and logical processes in the left hemisphere in most persons.

Localization - (physiology) the principle that specific functions have relatively circumscribed locations in some particular part or organ of the body