Injury and inhibition
Ben Platts-Mills
Ben Platts-Mills
Quote: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.
Quote: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.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell