Phineas P. Gage was born in 1823. He was a railroad construction worker outside a small town of Cavendish, Vermont. On September 13, 1848, Phineas suffered from a traumatic brain injury, which caused severe damage to parts of his frontal brain due to his accident at work.
1. What was Phineas Gages’ personality like before the accident? Gage was an intelligent well balanced man full of life with a great personality and good leadership skills. Modest and reliable, capable of making careful decisions.
Survivors of traumatic brain injury are lucky. Two examples of lucky traumatic brain injury survivors are Phineas Gage and Gary Busey. These two are lucky along with the other millions of traumatic brain injury survivors. Phineas Gage and Gary Busey were both lucky because they were given a second chance at life. In addition both narrowly evaded death.
Phineas Gage was a railroad worker in the 1800's who was working on blowing up the side of the mountain. This process involved drilling a hole into a rock, filling it with blasting powder, then putting sand on top of the powder before packing it down with an iron rod. One day, Phineas Gage forgot to put sand in the hole, so when he started packing it with the iron rod, it reacted with the blasting powder and created a spark. This caused the iron rod to rocket upward towards Phineas Gage. The explosion drove the iron rod through Phineas Gage's head, entering underneath his left cheekbone, going through the left frontal area of his brain, and exiting through the midline of his head. To everybody's surprise, he survived the extreme injury and
Gage’s family described his behavior as a new person that was not Phines. Dr. Harlow could make a connection on how damage to the frontal lobe can change the function. It concluded that specific regions of the brain were responsible for different function( Damasio,Frank), Could there have been a way to make Phineas Gage change his behavior in a biological way? You would be able to argue how neuroplasticity can help repair the functions that would have been damage. What neuroplasticity is the brain's potential to create new and recognize new neural pathways to adapt and form connections (what is neuroplasticity.com). If the brain would lose a function neuroplasticity can help to utilize and form new connections that would be able to help summon the function that was lost due to damage caused. In Phineas Gage the neuroplasticity would not be able to form new connections because his damage was done at a point where the neuroplasticity has formed most of connections. The ages where there is an abundance of neuroplasticity and is making connections with
One of the most amazing moments of that class was the chance that I had to visit a human anatomy lab at a local college. There college students showed us the cadavers they had been working on, allowing us to see the human body up close and personal. I saw the difference between a smoker’s lung and a non-smoker’s lung, exactly how a knee replacement works, and other insights to the human body.
In 1848, Phineas Gage was a 25 year old working man. An accident occurred to him at work one day which radically changed how the brain was viewed and known to function. He was helping to prepare the way for railroads to be put down when an explosion happened unexpectedly and it sent a 43 inch tamping iron into Phineas Gage’s head through his face, skull and brain. The tamping iron went all the way through and landed some ways off. The remarkable thing was that Gage became conscious within a matter of a few minutes after the incident. Not only did he wake up but he still had the ability to walk and to talk. Even though Gage survived his injuries he was no longer the same.
In our lifetime we will hear unimaginable stories of people who survive the craziest circumstances. One that comes to mind is the story about 50 Cent being shot nine times, surviving, and then thriving in his music career afterward. Although 50 Cent’s dramatic situation is a bit different than the one I will be informing you about, it’s still an interesting survivor’s story. On the other hand, Phineas Gage’s injury surviving story is one that has gone down in the history books for a couple of different reasons. Phineas Gage’s incident differs from most survivor stories because Gage had a 3 foot, 8 inch long, 1.25 inch diameter iron rod, weighing almost 14 pounds, missile through a portion of his head
The nineteenth century saw an explosion in knowledge regarding the brain unlike any before. For centuries, the brain had been considered the seat of human intelligence. However, the brain of the classics was a singular organ of
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Imagine a situation where your entire personality is changed forever by an object that pierces an area of your brain. Those who have had a frontal lobotomy, whether purposefully or not, have had their personality changed permanently. An unlucky foreman of the Rutland Railroad, Phineas Gage, was on the receiving end of a tragic occurrence that severed the frontal lobe area of his prefrontal cortex. He underwent the experience of having a railroad spike pierce him beneath his left cheek and exit through his skull, consequently injuring an important area of his brain. This occurrence changed one part of Gage’s personality completely, though he seemed almost entirely functional after his accident. The one thing that changed in Gage was his ability to imagine the future. He lived completely present in the moment. The unique accident that affected Phineas Gage can be broken down with various different philosophical approaches to answer what is called the “mind-body problem”. The mind-body problem is composed of attempting to explain things like beliefs, consciousness, emotions, etc., in organisms. Physicalism, dualism, and functionalism all have their unique explanation for the mind-body problem’s implication of Phineas Gage’s accident.
There were many good topics we learned about this semester and the topic that I think is the best is when we learned about was the 19th Amendment. the 19th Amendment was created to give women their rights. Around the roaring twenties there was a big protest called the women’s rights movement which caused women to have their rights granted to them. Before this movement women did have the right to do anything really, they didn’t have the right to vote, they didn’t have have the right to own anything, they could not go out and buy anything because they could not work, and they could not do as they pleased. Women only really had a few jobs and that is stay at the house all day cook, clean, and take care of their husbands. This is why the Women’s
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