In the book A Separate Peace, Phineas is a character who exudes idealism, as is shown in the rules of his game Blitzball. The rules of Blitzball can essentially be summed up in the third and most important of Finny’s commandments: “You always win at sports” (35). This is an undisputed rule of Blitzball; there is no winner, and the only purpose the game serves is for the players to have fun. This is shown when the ball is thrown at Leper Lepellier and Leper is scared and refuses the ball. Instead of ignoring this and possibly making Leper upset, Finny says “The reciever can refuse a pass if he happens to chose to …….We call that that the Lepellier Refusal” (39). In this passage, Finny is obviously creating rules just for the happiness of one…
1 Why is the story of Phineas Gage considered so extraordinary? What does his story teach us about the brain?…
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”.…
The Phineas Gage accident helped explain the role of the brain in cognitive functions. The accident revealed how the brain areas support cognitive functions. There are various brain areas that support cognitive functions. For example, the left frontal region helps in personality development. After the accident doctors examined the skull to see the lesion that caused personality change. The lesion was found in the left frontal region. The lesion affected personality development and led to loose of personality. Also, during the…
Thomas Gage can be called significant for many reasons. The main thing he is known for is his many years of service in North America; he played the role of a military commander in the early days of the American war of Independence. He also did other great things that I as a citizen of the United States feel that he should be credited for, while he was known for having little talent for command, his real skill was as an administrator. He fully proved that this was his greatest skill when he was known as the military governor of Montréal from 1761 to 1763. He did things like confront legacies of the French and Indian war; he even tried to keep colonist who wanted to buy land away from new conflicts with the Indians.…
Phineas’ accomplishments and personality. There was only one person in his path to superiority, and that person was Phineas. In order to overcome this obstacle known as Phineas, the only solution was to get rid of him.…
Phineas is perfect in every way, to Gene. Sometimes Gene gets jealous of him because he can get away with just about anything. “I was beginning to see that Phineas could get away with anything.”(pg.25) Ordinary people would have gotten in trouble if they had been in the same situations as Phineas. His charm and smooth ability to get his way is what Gene envies the most. “He…
This essay explains what can be learnt about the relationship between brain and behaviour using the case of Phineas Gage and imaging techniques. It starts by briefly describing neurons. It then goes on to look at what can be learnt by studying accidental brain damages and the effect they can have on behaviour using Phineas Gage’s case. This essay acknowledges that there are limitations on what can be learnt from accidental brain lesions and looks at how non-accidental damages and brain imaging techniques used by biological psychologists contribute and supplement the understanding of the relationship between brain function and behaviour.…
In this entry, I will be covering chapter one. In chapter one a former student of the school Devon returns and sees that the school is much better condition than when he had last seen it. The narrator walks around the school grounds and describes how it looks now compared to how the school/town looked whenever he was living there during a time of war. When he gets to an enfeebled tree it makes an old memory replay in his head. In the memory, the narrator whose name hasn’t been revealed yet and four of his friends go to this tree. Then the narrator’s best friend Phineas climbed up the frightening tree and jumped into the river below without majorly injuring himself. Phineas considered that his “ contribution to the war effort ”. After…
In the novel "A Separate Peace" by John Knowles, the relationship between Phineas and Gene is greatly influenced by Gene's undying amount of loyalty to Finny. Gene is a rather unstable main character who doesn't have a lot of confidence in himself and isn't the most courageous person, so he is easily influenced by the much more confident and bold Phineas. This difference in their personalities can easily be spotted when the two are together, specifically at the beach and in events concerning the tree.…
1 Why is the story of Phineas Gage considered so extraordinary? What does his story teach us about the brain? Phineas Gages’s story is so extra ordinary because a metal rod was impaled through his head and destroyed most of his frontal lobe. His story has taught us that different parts of the brain control different things and the part of his brain that got injured effects a person’s memory, personality, and emotion.…
The first notable theorist after Aristotle was Rene’ Descartes who held the belief that the flow of animal spirits caused behaviors. He held a mechanistic view arrived at because of the statues of St. Germaine. Descartes thought humans followed the same pattern as the statues with water flowing through tubes, representing nerves and the fluid that result in muscle stimulation (Millis, n.d.). In 1664 Thomas Willis published Anatomy of the Brain. The publication viewed the brain’s structures as…
In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald many themes are presented. One of…
1. Why is the story of Phineas Gage considered so extraordinary? What does his story teach us about the brain?…
In the first chapter, Gene describes Phineas in a very descriptive yet unemotional way. Gene states, “For such an extraordinary athlete-even as a Lower Middler Phineas had been the best athlete in the school- he was not spectacularly built. He was my height- five feet eight and a half inches (I had been claiming five feet nine before he became my roommate, but he had said in public with that simple self-shocking acceptance of his, “No, you’re the same height I am, five eight and a half. Were on the short side”). He weighed a hundred fifty pounds, a galling ten pounds more than I did, which flowed from his legs to torso around shoulders to arms and full strong neck in an uninterrupted unity of strength” (16). Gene reveals his admiration for Phineas in this passage. Although this quotation seems simple and unbiased, Gene makes subtle comments that foreshadow a rivalry between the two boys. When Gene compares their height, a potential rivalry is revealed, along with Gene’s paranoia. Gene also refers to Phineas’s “shocking self-acceptance”. Gene is uncomfortable with himself and witnessing that nothing seems to phase Phineas is shocking to Gene. This realization for Gene will arose problems later in the novel.…