Phineas Gage Paper
PSY360 Cognitive Psychology
Bobbi G. Rice
November 21, 2010
Diana Keys

Phineas Gage Paper Phineas P Gage was a railway construction workman who, in 1848, received a devastating penetrating head injury. A 4 ft long tamping iron was fired by accident through his skull destroying both frontal lobes. He survived the accident by chance, the care he received from colleagues at the scene and through medical care received from doctors (Grieve, 2010). Gage remained conscious on the way to the local physician. Upon arrival, Dr. Harlow, the attending physician, bandaged his wounds, which continued to bleed for another 2 days. Gage showed no obvious, immediate mental discrepancies, but an aggressive viral infection set in at the damaged area which led to a month of semiconscious recovery. Once infection finally subsided, Gage made a complete recovery, except for blindness in his left eye and weakness in the left side of his face. Upon his returning to work it became quite evident that Mr. Gage was not entirely himself. The damage to Gage’s brain was located in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex; but, in order to understand the personality changes that Gage underwent after his recovery it is necessary to first examine the underlying neurological and cognitive interplay thereof. “The higher cognitive functions, working memory, mental imagery, and willed action, are all intimately associated with consciousness” (Frith & R, 1996, ). Perception, attention, emotion, planning and action, learning and memory, thinking, language and all other aspects of cognition all take place in the brain. If thinking is the process, using information to make decisions- then the frontal lobe is crucial for thinking, and without the frontal lobes we are at the mercy of our environment. Where we respond to events without reflection, we are unable to plan for our futures; it is this capacity the ability to plan for the future that differentiates us from all other species. Until recently, little was known about how the human inner compass works. This is partly because "sense of direction" is not one neatly defined ability. Instead, it is made up of many different skills, such as awareness and memory of your surroundings, sensing your speed and direction changes over time, and tracking the location of objects and places relative to you as you move through an environment. These skills rely on many different parts of the brain, including those involved in vision, memory and imagination, which are tied together into a "cognitive map" by the hippocampus (Berdik, 2009). After frontal lobe damage, a person may have not have the competence any more to apply that he lost his ability to problem solve, lost ability to be a functioning individual again, such is the case of Phineas Gage. The somatic-marker hypothesis, first proposed by A. Damasio, stipulates that somatic markers, the feelings and emotional reactions that we associate with certain responses, play an integral part in the prediction of long-term outcomes (Thagard & Wagar, 2004). Somatic markers act as a mediating force in the cognitive representation of decision-making by highlighting outcomes that have positive predictions and negating outcomes that have negative calculation. It is through this process that a life form is able to integrate affective and memory information to properly predict the future outcome of current events. While the events surrounding the accident of Phineas Gage was a tragedy it was able to open up and enlighten many questions around the localization in the brain as well as mind-body interaction. In today’s society we have the CAT Scan and the MRI to help depict the severity of brain injuries but these inventions would come decades after Phineas Gage.

References:
Grieve, Andrew (2010). Phineas P Gage - ‘The man with the Iron bar’ Trauma July 2010 12: 171-174, first published on July 16, 2010 doi: 10.1177/1460408610375648.
Happé, F., Ehlers, S., Fletcher, P., Frith, U., Johansson, M., Gillberg, C., Dolan, R., Frackowiak, R., & Frith, C.D. (1996). 'Theory of mind' in the brain”.
Berdik, Chris. (2009). New Scientist, 02624079, 8/15/2009, Vol. 203, Issue 2721. “Lost”. Retrieved on November 20, 2010.
Thagard, P., & Wagar, B. M., (2004). Spiking Phineas Gage: A neurocomputational theory of cognitive-affective integration in decision making. Psychological Review, 111(1), 67-79.Retrieved on November 20, 2010, from EBSCOHost Database.