In 1848, a railroad worker named Phineas Gage was seriously injured during an explosion on the job
A tapered metal rod ranging from 0.25 inches to 1.25 inches in diameter and over 3 feet long entered his skull just under his left cheek bone and exited through the top of his skull. The rod was found over twenty feet away. Amazingly, Gage lived even though he suffered massive damage to the left front of his brain. His personality and intellectual abilities changed, however. Before the accident, he was respected as a smart, capable and even-tempered man. After the accident, he was foul-mouthed and bad-tempered and could not make up his mind. In the years immediately preceding his death, he began to have epileptic seizures. Explain the changes observed in Mr. Gage based on your knowledge of the brain.
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The accident apparently damaged the frontal lobe and specifically the prefrontal cortex of the left side of Mr. Gage's brain. The frontal lobe is involved in memory and intellect. The prefrontal cortex is involved in judgment, ethics, and conscious. The changes Mr. Gage experienced indicate that the right side of his brain could not compensate for the losses on the left side of the brain. It is remarkable that the story doesn't mention that Mr. Gage lost some motor function on his right side since it is controlled by the primary motor region on left side of the brain. There is also no mention of loss of speech, which is largely processed on the left side of the brain. Perhaps the iron rod just missed those areas. As far as the epileptic seizures are concerned, it is possible that the accident damaged the basal ganglia to some degree. As he aged and lost connections between neurons that damage might have become more evident as the basal ganglia could no longer communicate effectively with the rest of the brain.
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