The Case of Phineas Gage

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.

Neurologist Antonio Damasio has written significantly on Gage and other patients that he studied on with similar injuries. Damasio viewed Gage's case as playing a crucial role in the history of neuroscience, and stated that Gage's story "was the historical beginnings of the study of the biological basis of behavior". Gage's case inspired the development of frontal lobotomy, which now is a psychosurgical procedure that leads to emotional response and personality traits. On the other hand, historical analysis doesn't support this claim because Gage's injury didn't have enough influence on the development of this practice.

Your friend Dave says: “How can you stand to study the history of psychology? Every single one of those theories is basically the same: the brain controls our behavior.” Given the history of psychology, evaluate Dave's claim using the following terms in their appropriate context:

Experiments with psychiatric diagnosis these are considered experiments that people sometimes volunteer or sometimes they have an illness and they have to take medication in order to find out what is going on. They might be given strong medication so they see how they react or they want to see what happens in their heads. Sometimes they hook them up into machines and take a look at their brains to see how the medication is working. When this process is done, they go and they see what is wrong. Sometimes their brain shows where the damage is done. I have gone to see someone when they are doing this to their brain and well the picture is not that nice. You could see the brain and where the damage is done the brains are moving. It

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.

* First, studies have shown that aspects of experience can sculpt features of brain structure.

My short assignment four best demonstrates this outcome. In this assignment, I explored the field of biopsychology, the study of the brain and behavior, by attending a lecture of biopsychology class here at the University of Washington. Dr. Lauren Graham spoke on the topic of the nervous system

Due to its primary role in processing memory and emotional reactions, over the last decade and a half psychologists have been linking the amygdala to psychopathy. It is involved in aversive conditioning and instrumental learning and is thus involved in all the processes that, when impaired, produce the same functional impairments displayed by psychopaths. Two famous studies conducted by Tiihonen and Kiehl respectively have confirmed this. Tiihonen used a volumetric MRI to test and confirm the positive correlation between low amygdaloid volume and a high degree of psychopathy in violent criminals (measured by the Hare checklist-revised) while Kiehl used a functional MRI to prove reduced amygdala response during an emotional memory task in individuals who scored high on the Hare checklist-revised. However, both these studies along with numerous others were conducted using violent offenders as subjects rather than individuals with psychopathy. Although many psychopaths do exhibit violent tendencies, not all violent offenders are necessarily psychopaths. A study conducted by Raine is one of the few that did focus only on individuals exhibiting psychopathy. In his study Raine was able to show reduced prefrontal grey matter in his test subjects. Unfortunately though, he was unable to differentiate between grey matter in different regions of the prefrontal cortex. It is however clear that there is one region of the frontal cortex that could be

Neuropsychology is the study of brain-behavior relationships (Barkley, 1983). It is the scientific study of the association between the different structures and physiological processes of the nervous system and the behavior of organisms (Barkley, 1983). The focus of this particular field in psychology is not just pertaining to humans as research on infrahumans consistently provides simple scientific information and data from which research ideas on humans will be drawn/ concluded from (Barkley, 1983). For example, research that was conducted on rats involved giving amphetamines to the rats with given closed head injuries yielded the option of exploring the use of stimulant drugs in helping the recovery of adults and children that have experienced accidental closed head trauma (Barkley, 1983). The field includes the study of developmental changes of the nervous system and it’s behavioral parallels as well as the effects of experimental and also accidental changes of the nervous system on the behavior of an individual (Barkley, 1983).

This essay will outline and compare both biological and behavioural perspectives on human behaviour. The history, major discoveries and theories will be discussed along with some of the most influential theorists in each of these two areas of psychology. This essay will also compare the two areas strengths and weaknesses in the field of psychology.

In order to understand why people act in antisocial ways, one needs to pinpoint which area of the brain controls social behavior. The prefrontal cortex has been thought to have something to do with control of social behavior ever since Phineas Gage's famous accident in 1848 (1). Phineas Gage was a

Title: Evaluate experimental and brain-imaging techniques and consider what they tell us about the brain and cognitive behaviour in typical and atypical individuals.

Behavioral neuroscience or biological psychology employs the principles of brain pathology to the study of human behavior through genetic, physiological, and developmental operations, as well as, the brain’s capacity to change with experience. Since the second world war, crime was largely attributed to mostly economic, political, and social factors, along with what psychologists termed at the time, the “weak character” of mental disturbance, and brain biology was rarely considered. However, new advances in neuroscience and technology have allowed a number of studies that link brain development, impairment, and injury to criminal violence. This emerging field of psychology explores the brain at a microscopic level, focusing studies on the roles that the brain’s neurons, circuitry, neurotransmitters, and basic biological processes play in defining and molding all human behavior.

Psychology is made up of many perspectives, such as, behavioural, biological, cognitive, social, humanistic and finally, psychodynamic. This essay will focus on the behavioural perspective and the biological perspective. According to J Walker (2012) the behavioural perspective is based on behaviourism and is the study of observing behaviour when in certain contexts and events. The biological perspective however, explains behaviour by focusing on the function of the nervous system, genes and the brain.

This essay will be focused on two different approaches to cognitive psychology: Cognitive Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. Cognitive Neuropsychology is concerned with the patterns of cognitive performance and emphasis on the cognitive effects of brain-damaged patients who suffered lesions, injuries or diseases, providing vest information on normal human cognition. (Eysenck and Keane 2015, p.5) Whereas cognitive neuroscience involves in-depth study of our brain and behaviours. As the brain contains numerous neurones and is so complicated, the cognitive neuroscience emphasis on the biological side of the brain and focuses on the lobes that are divided from the cerebral cortex.