FOR MOST of us, the thought of a metre-long iron bar through the head would make us wince. But, as we discovered on Case Study (Radio 4, Wednesday of last week), this is the sort of thing that gets the head-doctors really excited. But our health-and-safety-conscious nanny state has become so cautious that medics are not allowed to saw open the heads of living humans. Instead, they have to make do with historical subjects, such as Phineas Gage.
Mr Gage was a hard-working railwayman from Vermont, in the United States. In an accident in 1848, an explosion sent a tamping iron through the front part of his skull with such force that the bar ended up 30 feet away. In the words of a jolly ballad commemorating the event: “Phineas Gage had a hole in his head And everyone knew that he ought to be dead.” But he survived, even saying to the hospital surgeon: “Doctor, here’s business for you.”
Mr Gage lived for a further nine years before succumbing to epilepsy and other conditions. But, again in the words of Banjo Dan: “One thing’s for sure Old Gage isn’t Gage anymore.” He was no longer the sober, conscientious worker of old; he became unreliable, foul-mouthed, and, in modern medical jargon, “disinhibited”.
For the first time, there was living evidence for the supposition that different brain areas control different functions, including emotional and what, at least in the 19th century, might be regarded as moral attributes.
Fast-forward to the 21st century, where the number of incidents of brain trauma have provided hundreds of corroborating case studies. Philosophers and theologians, for the most part, no longer have a problem with the notion of social and emotional characteristics inhering in a certain part of the brain. But Mr Gage still fascinates. Students flock to see his skull at Harvard Medical School, and one doctor has recently created a putative model of Mr Gage’s brain to indicate the damaged parts.
The ways in which the problems are expressed are, of course, different now. At the end of Case Study we visited a brain-damage unit, and met a man whose accident has left him unable to make simple decisions. His doctors say he lacks a “goal-management framework”, and that he must create strategies to visualise and prioritise. No wonder the poor man sounds bewildered.
You might imagine that the star of It’s My Story (Radio 4, Thursday of last week) would suffer from disinhibition. After two serious accidents, two nervous breakdowns, and two suicide attempts, Drako Oho Zarhazar has had more than his fair share of disruption. But, by all accounts, this extraordinary character was an outrageous eccentric from an early age.
Toby Amies’s touching documentary, “The Man Whose Mind Exploded”, gave us a glimpse of a life lived in a kind of dream world, made even less real by Mr Zarhazar’s severe amnesia. His whole flat is an art installation, and he regards the world as a stage in which he plays the part of “Promoter of Love”.
He has worked with Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali, but now lives as a semi-recluse in his Brighton council house. This is an improvement on Barnum’s Museum, however, which is where Phineas Gage ended up. |
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