The Similarities Between Phineas And Adolescents

Phineas Gage’s brain behavior only converted to be comparable an adolescent’s after his accident when using a tamping iron on September 13, 1848 in Vermont. The tamping iron that went through him was a meter long!! Phineas Gage’s brain and behavior was extremely close to the adolescent’s brain and behavior. Although there are many resemblances, there are also some differences between Phineas and adolescents.

Phineas also relates to adolescents because of his brain after the accident. Phineas has something not accurate about his prefrontal cortex. Likewise, adolescents also have something wrong with their prefrontal cortex. The passage, Putting Phineas Together Again, describes the process of finding the path pf the tamping iron. On page

One way it is similar to an adolescent’s behavior is that both Phineas and adolescents can’t always control their behavior. In the section The Right Sort of Risks, they explain an experiment called the Marshmallow Test. In the experiment, children around the age of 4 were left in a room for 15 minutes alone with only a marshmallow and the knowledge that if they don’t eat it, then at the end of the 15 minutes, they get 2 marshmallows. After all of the data was collected, the most common reasons to this was lasting only a couple minutes then just eating it. This experiment displays that adolescents can’t always contain themselves because of not developed part of their brain. The same is true of Phineas. In the passage Horrible Accident in Vermont, page 263, Phineas,” sprouts vulgar language in the presence of woman.” This shows that he can’t control himself, and his behavior. Phineas’ and adolescents’ behaviors are very similar when it comes to reading social signs and knowing what to say, and not to say in a

One way it is different from an adolescents’ behavior is that Phineas will act like a child for the rest of his life, while adolescents will grow out of it. In the section Adolescence isn’t an Aberration paragraph 5 says,” adolescence as equivalent to the teenage years… simply the second decade of life… starting at puberty, around 12 or 13 years, and ending between 22 and 25 years.” These are some of the ways that people define adolescence. Although they are all different, one thing is in common: they all have an ending time to them. With Phineas though, he spent the rest of his life stuck acting like an adolescent. In the passage, Following Phineas Gage, we see Phineas jump from job to job after the accident. He went to P.T. Barnum’s freak show, then he works as a stable boy, then he gets a job as a stagecoach driver. In 1859 Phineas washes up on his families doorstep. These things show that Phineas couldn’t really make up his mind on what to, so he jumped haphazardly from one bizarre job to the next, with no plan. Phineas’ behavior and an adolescents’ behavior can be different. On occasion though, they can have similar