Phineas Gage Research Paper

Phineas Gage was the first known person to suffer from a grave, life altering brain energy. His personality suffered a major change and his friends and family described him as “no longer Gage”.

Gage, a 25 year old man, was working in a small town in Vermont clearing rocks as a foreman so that railroads could be built. A foreman molded gunpowder into designated holes, and then stamping the powder down with a metal stake. He was diligent in his work and was generally well liked by his co-workers. He was described to be “chipper and always cracking jokes within the long work day”.

One September day in 1848, Gage turned around to check if his co-workers, distracted, while molding gun powder in a blasting hole with an iron stake. At that moment, the gun powder lit and sent the tamping iron shooting through the air like a bullet from a gun. The stake’s force sent Gage backward and he hit the ground with extreme force. The sharp end of the iron entered underneath Gage’s left cheek bone and exited through his frontal lobe on the right side of his skull right at his hairline, landing 25-30 yards behind him. Records show us that Gage never lost consciousness and got up within minutes of his accident.

Gage was transported to the nearest physician
The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that contains you learning, behavior, personality and voluntary movement. According to Jack Van Horn, the passage of the metal stake caused major damage to the white matter connections throughout Gage's brain, which likely was a major contributor to the behavioral changes he experienced. White matter is the fatty substance covering the nerve fibers that connect the billions of neurons, which is the basic wiring of the brain. However, it is hard to diagnose frontal lobe damage because if the diagnosed is mean, enthusiastic, or introverted already, there is no way of measuring how said person was before the