Phineas Gage Case

The Incredible Case of Phineas Gage Phineas Gage has one of the most interesting and famous brain injury cases. Gage was born in New Hampshire on July 9, 1823. At the time of his injury he was a 25 year old hardworking and capable railroad foreman. His injury and the repercussions of it, has answered many questions about the brain and the role in plays in our bodies. September 13th, 1848 started out like any other day on the railroad for Gage but it surely didn’t end that way. His crew was moving rocks for a railroad track which involved drilling holes into boulders and filling them with dynamite. The entrance to the hole in the boulder would be filled with sand so that the blast would be directed towards the boulder and not the other way. Gage was using a tamping iron to prepare for an explosion and while doing so, a spark came from the tamping iron and ignited the dynamite. This caused the tamping iron to fly through the air, rip through Gage’s skull, and land

He reported that he was profane, fitful, and other things that his family and coworkers already knew to be true. From the report it seems as if the damage in Gage’s brain was in his prefrontal lobe in the left hemisphere and maybe in the right too. His report was very significant due to the fact that it aligned with other neurological reports about the relationship between the brain and personality. Almost a decade later, Harlow’s reports helped to confirm Ferrier’s findings in that damage to the prefrontal cortex could result in personality changes (Costandi, 2006). Today, we still do not know much more about the prefrontal cortex and frontal lobe than what Harlow, Ferrier, and other neurologists at that time were able to discover. We know that the frontal lobe is the largest lobe in the brain, and that the prefrontal lobe controls emotional regulation and self-control. (Weiten, 2014, p. 79,