Injury and inhibition

Injury and inhibition

Ben Platts-Mills

Since Descartes’ Error, claims about Gage have included a 2016 paper that described him as an ‘extremely cruel’ person who ‘enjoys harming people’, and the terms ‘abusive’ and ‘harsh’ were used in a 2020 editorial. He changed, as one commentator wrote in 2000, from a ‘mild-mannered, responsible foreman’ to ‘an aggravated, antisocial deviant’.

In 2018, Gage was chosen as the first of six ‘essential landmark case reports’ for neuropsychiatry. If you search ‘frontal lobe injury’, ‘frontal lobe disorder’ or ‘executive functions’ on Wikipedia today, you’ll find a version of Gage’s story rehearsed on every page. If you search functional localisation, it’s a picture of Gage’s skull from Harlow’s paper that greets you, pierced by the tamping iron like an olive on a cocktail stick.

The sensational impact of this version of Gage’s story would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that it’s largely fictional.