3 ms·
Yeah, fully agree on being cautious here. On Phineas Gage — indeed, he made headlines for his seemingly "normal functioning", but the devastating impact on his
by kashyapc 5y ago
Yeah, fully agree on being cautious here.
On Phineas Gage — indeed, he made headlines for his seemingly "normal functioning", but the devastating impact on his emotional capacities was skipped over in the popular press! So let's hear what happened after he "fully recovered", quoting from the 1994 study on this topic by the maverick neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio[1]:
[quote]
Gage was fully recovered. He remained as able-bodied and appeared to be as intelligent as before the accident; he had no impairment of movement or speech; new learning was intact, and neither memory nor intelligence in the conventional sense had been affected.
On the other hand, he had become irreverent and capricious. His respect for the social conventions by which he once abided had vanished. His abundant profanity offended those around him. Perhaps most troubling, he had taken leave of his sense of responsibility. He could not be trusted to honor his commitments. His employers had deemed him "the most efficient and capable" man in their "employ" but now had to dismiss him. In the words of his physician, "the equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculty and animal propensities" had been destroyed.
In the words of his friends and acquaintances, "Gage was no longer Gage". Gage began a new life of wandering that ended a dozen years later, in San Francisco, under the custody of his family. Gage never returned to a fully independent existence, never again held a job comparable to the one he once had. His accident had made headlines but his death went unnoticed.
[/quote]
[1] http://jneunuebel.psych.udel.edu/Webpage/Courses/assets/Paper2%20-%20Structure%20Nervous%20System%20-%20Damasio%20Damasio%201994%20Science.pdf http://jneunuebel.psych.udel.edu/Webpage/Courses/assets/Pape...
- morelisp 5y agoPerhaps you're the one who should be a bit more cautious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage#Exaggeration_and_distortion_of_mental_changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage#Exaggeration_and_... Harlow's statement that Gage "continued to work in various places; could not do much, changing often, and always finding something that did not suit him in every place he tried" refers only to Gage's final months, after convulsions had set in. But it has been misinterpreted as meaning that Gage never held a regular job after his accident [and] "never returned to a fully independent existence"... In fact, after his initial post-recovery months spent traveling and exhibiting, Gage supported himself — at a total of just two different jobs — from early 1851 until just before his death in 1860. His symptoms and treatment were over-interpreted and perhaps exaggerated for ideological reasons even by his contemporaries: Bigelow's and Harlow's contradictory evaluations (less than a year apart) by differences in their educational backgrounds, in particular their attitudes toward cerebral localization (the idea that different regions of the brain are specialized for different functions) and phrenology (the nineteenth-century pseudoscience that held that talents and personality can be inferred from the shape of a person's skull)... He seems also to have lucked into an ideal treatment program shortly after the accident: Gage's stagecoach work — "a highly structured environment in which clear sequences of tasks were required [but within which] contingencies requiring foresight and planning arose daily" — resembles rehabilitation regimens first developed by Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria for the reestablishment of self-regulation in World War II soldiers suffering frontal lobe injuries (One easy mistake to make is taking a neuroscientist as an historiographer just because the historical topic happens to involve a brain.)
- kashyapc 5y agoThanks for the extra details. I do agree with your last point. That said, perhaps you could be a bit more charitable? I was not trying to provide extensive treatise on Gage's injury. I was highlighting one specific point of emotional impairment due to damage to PFC.
- morelisp 5y agoI used the exact same framing you did, less the twee-lecturer "So let's hear..." crap.