Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett Page B

(beliefs, attitudes, loves and hates) are held within the mind, or “spirit,” or whatever term is given to the immaterial elements of a person.
    Then, on September 13, 1848, as a result of an unplanned explosion, railroad worker Phineas Gage had his brain impaled by an iron rod more than 3 feet long. It entered his skull just under his left eye, passed right through his left frontal lobe, and exited via the top of his skull. It landed some 80 feet away. The force propelling the rod was so great that a human head offered as much resistance as a net curtain. To clarify, this was not a paper cut.
    You’d beforgiven for assuming this would have been fatal. Even today, “huge iron rod right through the head” sounds like a 100-percent-lethal injury. And this happened in the mid-1800s, when stubbing your toe usually meant a grim death from gangrene. But, no, Gage survived, and lived another twelve years.
    Part of the explanation for this is that the iron pole was very smooth and pointed, and traveling at such a speed that the wound was surprisingly precise and “clean.” It destroyed almost all the frontal lobe in the left hemisphere of his brain but the brain has impressive levels of redundancy built into it, so the other hemisphere picked up the slack and provided normal functioning. Gage has become iconic in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, as his injury supposedly resulted in a sudden and drastic change in his personality. From a mild-mannered and hardworking sort, he became irresponsible, ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, and even psychotic. “Dualism” had a fight on its hands as this discovery firmly established the idea that the workings of the brain are responsible for a person’s personality.
    However, reports of Gage’s changes vary wildly, and towards the end of his life, he was employed long-term as a stagecoach driver, a job with a lot of responsibility and public interaction, so even if he did experience disruptive personality changes he must have got better again. But the extreme claims persist, largely because contemporary psychologists (at the time, a career dominated by self-aggrandizing wealthy white men, whereas now it’s . . . actually, never mind) leapt on Gage’s case as an opportunity to promote their own theories about how the brain worked; and if that meant attributing things that never happened to a lowly railway worker, what of it? Thiswas the nineteenth century, he wasn’t exactly going to find out via Facebook. Most of the extreme claims about his personality changes were seemingly made after his death, so it was practically impossible to refute them.
    But even if people were dedicated enough to investigate the actual personality or intellectual changes Gage had experienced, how would they do this? IQ tests were half a century away, and that’s just one possible property that might have been affected. So Gage’s case led to two persistent realizations about personality: it’s a product of the brain, and it’s a real pain to measure in a valid, objective manner.
    E. Jerry Phares and William Chaplin, in their 2009 book Introduction to Personality , 1 came up with a definition of personality that most psychologists would be willing to accept: “Personality is that pattern of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that distinguishes one person from another and that persists over time and situations.”
    In the next few sections, we’re going to look at a few fascinating aspects—the approaches used to measure personality, what it is that makes people angry, how they end up compelled to do certain things, and that universal arbiter of a good personality, sense of humor.
    Nothing personal
    (The questionable use of personality tests)
    My sister Katie was born when I was three, when my own puny brain was still relatively fresh. We had the same parents, grew up at the same time, in the same place. It was the