Predisposed by Hibbing John R. Smith Kevin B. Alford John R. & Kevin B. Smith & John R. Alford

Author:Hibbing, John R., Smith, Kevin B., Alford, John R. & Kevin B. Smith & John R. Alford [John R. Hibbing]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136281174
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Chapter 6

Different Slates

Listening to people’s political views can sound like listening to a reflex … it just sounds like something in the wiring.

Colin Firth

All is disgust when a man leaves his own nature and does what is unfit.

Sophocles

On Wednesday, September 13, 1848, a construction gang working for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad was busy blasting rock to clear the way for a new stretch of track just outside Cavendish, Vermont. It was not a job for the faint of heart. It involved boring a hole into a rock bed and filling it with stuffthat went bang; you definitely did not want to be standing next to one of those boreholes when it went off. The really dicey part was tamping down the explosives, which required taking an iron bar and ramming down a charge of blasting powder to make sure it was packed firmly. This was a job that had to be done carefully and correctly, and on this particular day, late in the afternoon, the 25-year-old foreman of the work gang biffed it. He jammed his tamping iron down a bit too enthusiastically, detonating the explosive and launching what amounted to a sharpened 13-and-a-half pound metal broom handle into his face. The tamping iron shot into his leftcheek, tore through his lefttemporal lobe, and came out the top of his skull before describing a short arc and landing about 25 yards behind him. The name of this unfortunate fellow was Phineas Gage.

Believe it or not, having his cranium traumatically ventilated did not kill him.1 In fact, the immediate aftereffects were surprisingly minimal. He spoke lucidly within a few minutes of the accident, walked with virtually no assistance, and proceeded to live another 12 years. Yet Gage did not exactly recover. That sort of injury leaves physical scars, of course, but the story of Phineas Gage continues to fascinate because the injury led to drastic changes in his personality. By all accounts, before the accident Gage was an industrious and upstanding fellow, but afterwards he was described as a moody, depraved, and quarrelsome wastrel (there is something of a debate about whether these changes have been exaggerated, but there is little question that Gage’s personality and psychology did indeed change).2

Gage’s story has been widely popularized by academics as a standard case study of how social attitudes and behavior can change as a result of brain injuries, but Gage is far from the only example of this sort of occurrence. Researchers like the physician and neuroscientist Oliver Sacks (author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) write books on how neuroanatomical trauma or abnormality can radically alter social behavior.3 There are textbooks devoted to explaining the ability of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) to alter neural structure and functioning, thereby affecting mood, personality, and cognitive styles.4 A depressingly fast-growing research literature documents the psychological effects of TBIs suffered by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

All of this bluntly and inarguably demonstrates that biology and psychology are inextricably

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