A one (train) track mind

Today represented my first day of real classes for the new semester.  I know it's a friday, but with most of the week dedicated to syllabi and such it took until today to really get the ball rolling.  But I will say while my 8 am classes are rough (I'm a really huge fan of sleep), my neural systems class is promising to be enlightening and entertaining.

But onto the "meat" of my experience.  As my attempted-witty title implies, today's topic revolved around a train track.  Or the creation of a train track I guess.   It's a famous story I first happened upon in middle school.  My close friend, Max, was telling me at lunch one day about this guy who had a railroad spike go through his head and survived.  At the time, we just grossed each other out with our speculations about the amount of blood spilled during the accident and left it that.

The only known picture of Phineas Gage.

I don't think I could've realized how this little memory would reappear in such force 7 years later.  But there I sat in class and listened to the story of Phineas Gage.  It runs a little something like this:

Phineas Gage was a railroad constructor in the 1840s.  In fact, he was a well known foreman who was praised for his hard work and personable handling of his workers.  Well in the area he was working, the land was extremely rocky and hilly so they would blast the hills with explosives.  The procedure was in the dimple form of drill a hole, fill it with explosives, pack sand over that, leave blast zone, and blow the thing up.  However, the 1800s aren't lauded for the safety concerns shown by the working class.  And as luck would have it, Phineas Gage was in the process of packing in the powdered explosive with a tamping rod when his attention was distracted.  The rod scraped against some of the rock and created a spark which ignited the powder.  The explosion forced the rod up through his cheek and out the top of his skull.  According to witnesses, he fell to the ground and convulsed a few times but quickly regained consciousness.  His fellow workers carried him to an ox-cart by which he was taken into town to be cared for by a physician.

But the amazing part isn't just that he survived the massive blood loss.  Nor are we simply stunned that he could find a sense of normalcy after having a gaping hole left in his skull.  What truly fascinates me and my fellow neuroscience enthusiasts are the cognitive changes which resulted from his "run in" with the tamping rod.

Though our data comes from merely 2 reports given by the physician who first cared for Phineas and did a single follow up 14 years later, the reports are fascinating.  It seems after the injury Phineas became childish, obstinate, impatient, and lacking self control.  He lost his job and friends described him as no longer himself.  It was like he had become a whole new person.  So what elicited this radical change?

Enter modern technology.  Thanks to some sophisticated software, scientists were able to trace the pathway the tamping rod cleared in Phineas' head.  According to their measurements, it pushed directly through his ventromedial prefrontal cortex.  Though the prefrontal cortex is generally considered one lobe, it can be broken into different regions which process different types of information.  For Phineas, the part that he lost is highly tied to emotion regulation.  And believe it or not, emotion is extremely important for making good judgements!

The computer reconstruction of the
damage caused by Phineas' tamping rod.

Sadly, it was at about this point that the bell rang.  As engrossed in the story that I was, the next the class was filtering through the door and my stomach rumbled loudly in protest to the light breakfast from that morning.  So, my dear reader, I will leave you here.  I hope I've provided some food for thought!