Anastasia's Psychology Blog: Phineas Gage

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Phineas Gage was a worker or part of the crew in railroads constructions who worked by excavating rocks to make way for the railroads. His job included drilling holes and filling them with dynamite. Phineas gage is one of the earliest cases with brain damage that survived. On September 1848 while working on the Rutland and Burlington railroad a terrible accident happened. When Phineas gage was compacting the explosive powder with his tamping rod, a spark ignited the powder, this made his tamping rod go straight up into his lower left cheek bone and behind his eye, passing right through his skull. As a result to this accident and his injuries in the frontal lobe, his wife and close ones began to notice very dramatic changes in his personality. He became an aggressive man with anger problems. He was antisocial, with bad manners and could not hold a job for long. We learned that the frontal lobe controls your emotions and your personality. After the damage done to Gages frontal lobe you could see extreme changes in his personality.

Phineas gages story connects with the theories of brain localization and lateralization. Brain localization means that different parts of the brain have different functions, and that all the parts of the brain do not do the same thing, while Brain lateralization means that some functions are carried out mostly on only one side of the brain. Phineas Gage’s accident was a huge step for scientists to learn about the brain and how it worked.