Phineas Gage
PSY/360

Abstract

In 1848, there was a railroad worker named Phineas Gage, who was severely injured on the job. In this essay, the author will discuss the details of the accident and what it revealed about how the different areas of the human brain support cognitive function. I will also discuss the characteristics of primary memory, the process of memory from perception and retrieval and the unreliability of memory retrieval.

Phineas Gage
Phineas gage is known as one of the most famous documented cases of brain injury. This brain injury occurred on September 13th, 1848 while Gage was working on the railroad excavating rocks with a tampering rod in the State of Vermont. An explosion occurred on the job-site that caused a tampering rod propelled at an extremely high speed to enter and penetrate Gage’s skull. This tampering rod entered his skull under his left cheek bone and exited through the top of his head; it was later recovered with bits of brain matter and blood on it. The amazing thing is that throughout this horrific accident, Mr. Gage never lost consciousness, in fact, by January of the following year; he had started to live a normal life. However, it was noted that around this time, Mr. Gage was considered to be suffering from some major changes in his personality.
What Phineas Gage’s Accident Reveals about Cognitive Functions “Cognition refers to the higher order functions that are needed for learning and interacting with a person's environment. Each human brain is capable of multiple cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, executive functions and language. Each of the cognitive brain functions is highly interconnected, with an exchange of information between functions” (Stannard, 2010). When Phineas Gage's accident occurred, many people were skeptical because it was such a horrific accident, and it was hard to believe that anyone could survive an ordeal like that and lead any type of normal life. The accident occurred in September 1948 and according to his wife, and others that were close to him, in the course of a few months, (January 1849), his behavior had changed dramatically. Up to that point; Phineas Gage was considered to be even tempered, however in January, People began noticing that Mr. Gage was irrereverant, fitful that he engaged in gross profanity and was impatient of any type of restraint or advice. In Gage's case, according to the physician (Harlow) who treated Gage after the accident, because the tamping rod entered the cranium, passed through the anterior left lobe of the cerebrum, the injury was to his cerebrum, and limited to his left hemisphere, this caused Gage to have changed in his personality, thoughts, speech, planning, and organizational skills and did not cause any damage to his other cognitive functions. Mr. Gage's accident is one of the most famous documented cases of brain injury. Phineas Gage's is considered to be a legend in the annals of neurology, which is largely based on the study of brain damaged patients. "This was the first case when doctors made a definite connection between an injury to the brain and a change in personality," says Malcolm Macmillan, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Melbourne in Australia and an expert on Gage. Linking the damage in Gage's prefrontal cortex to his sudden erratic behavior was one of the first clues that the prefrontal cortex was responsible for personality expression and decision making (Stern, 2012).
The Characteristics of Primary Memory Primary memory is more commonly known as short-term memory. Primary memory is the workstation in which information is temporarily encoded, manipulated, and either forgotten, or passed on to secondary memory, according to many of the studies cited in the text the capacity of primary memory is between five and nine units, depending on the type of unit and individual in question (Willingham, 2007). It appears that primary memory is limited to two seconds of acoustic code and four visuospatial objects. However, the capacity of semantic-based memory is more flexible because of the mediating effect of chunking. Chunking occurs when the items to be memorized are divided into small and easily memorizable chunks or groups. This method works best when the order of the items is not important. With primary memory, information is stored when a person first obtains it. When the information is obtained, it is deciphered and then it will be retained for later retrieval or discarded. The information obtained will be stored in the primary memory, however; this information is subject to interference, and this information can be forgotten. Over the course of time the information stored is subject to decay and can be lost from the primary memory storage. The capacity of the primary memory varies from one individual to the next, and some types of information are easier to retain than other. According to Willingham (2007), “It appears that material can be coded in primary memory in at least three ways: visuospatially, acoustically (in terms of sound), and semantically (in terms of meaning)”.
The Process of Memory from Perception to Retrieval

When information is stored in a person’s short-term memory, it is often passed along to be stored in a person’s long-term memory. The longer the persons studies an object and if the person gives that object his or her full attention, there is a much greater chance that the information will be passed along to a person’s long-term memory. There- fore, rehearsal, and attention play a significant role in what and how much information is conveyed and stored for later retrieval. Once example of this would be when a person is rehearsing lines for a play, or attempting to memorize a poem as information is rehearsed, is likely that it will be stored in long-term memory so that the poem can be recalled and recited correctly at a later date.
Some information is also transferred from long-term memory back to short-term memory. This might be information that is not needed on a regular basis, but it still handy for use when the current situation calls for it. One example of this would be that a person likes a particular type of dressing on their salad if he or she asked “What type of dressing would you like for your salad?” the fact that they prefer ranch dressing would be retrieved from their long-term memory and enter into their short-term memory, providing them with the correct response. The Unreliability of Memory Retrieval “Most memory researchers believe that any serious abuse will be remembered into adulthood - whether a single event or oft-repeated. Many therapists believe that it is extremely common for a person to actively repress abuse memories. According to this belief system, an adult could have been sexually abused as a child hundreds (or even thousands) of times and have no current memory of any of the events, even though the adult could recall other memories of mundane childhood activities from the same years. The survivors would not even remember that something dreadful happened during their childhood. The more serious the abuse and the more frequent the abuse; the more likely the memories will be repressed” (Repressed Memories and Recovered Memory, 2012 pg.1). The controversy over the validity of repressed and recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) has been extraordinarily bitter. Data on cognitive functioning in people reporting repressed and recovered memories of trauma has been strikingly scarce. Recent laboratory studies have been designed to test hypotheses about cognitive mechanisms that ought to be operative if people can repress and recover memories of trauma or if they can form false memories of trauma. Contrary to clinical lore, these studies have shown that people reporting CSA histories are not characterized by a superior ability to forget trauma-related material. Other studies have shown that individuals reporting recovered memories of either CSA or abduction by space aliens are characterized by heightened proneness to form false memories in certain laboratory tasks. Although cognitive psychology methods cannot distinguish true memories from false ones, these methods can illuminate mechanisms for remembering and forgetting among people reporting histories of trauma. One example of how memory retrieval can be unreliable is in the absence of cues, if someone were asked to recall a conversation or an event that happened 10 years ago, it would be highly unlikely that this conversation or event could be recalled in exact detail. However, if asked to recall an event or conversation that occurred more recently, it would be retrievable as it is information that the brain has stored recently and would not be corrupted by other event or conversation that occurred over a period of years. Memory retrieval is not always reliable. Despite the fact that information may have been important at the time it was obtained and equally as important at the present time. Needing to retrieve stored information from memory at will does not mean it is necessarily possible.

Conclusion
A human brain has a major role in a person’s cognitive functions. Each part of the brain has a different function; these functions control a person’s attention language, memory, and personality. When a person has an injury to a specific part of his or her brain, (in Gage’s case the injury was to his cerebrum) it affected his personality. In other cases of damaged parts of the brain a person’s breathing, speech, and motor skills could be affected. Phineas Gage’s brain injury created a major personality change that created an “inappropriateness of behavior in a social context” (Roizman, 2010) and cause him to lose his cognitive functions, such as “planning and evaluating outcomes and consequences of actions and events (Roizman, 2010).

References

Repressed Memories and Recovered Memory Therapy, pg.1 Retrieved January17, 2012 from: http://www.caic.org.au/fms-sra/rmt.htm

Roizman, T. (2010). The Brain Functions Involved in Cognitive Functions. Retrieved from http://www.livestrong.com/article/177861-the-brain-functions-involved-in-cognitive-functions/
Stannard, L. (2010). Cognitive Brain Functions. Retrieved from http://www.livestrong.com/article/84586-cognitive-brain-functions/

Stern, V. (2010). Phineas gage. The Scientist, 24(2), 68-68. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/250857778?accountid=35812

Willingham, D. T. (2007). Cognition: The thinking animal. New York, NY: Pearson Prentice Hall.