Phineas Gage

Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and Science of Remembering is a nonfiction book based on many cases of people with spectacular memories by Joshua Foer. The reader gets to learn about all of these cases where events or environment has caused someone to increase their memory or decrease their memory. I learned about all of these cases of incredible memory like Daniel or Kim Peek who inspired the 1988 academy award winning movie Rain Man. He was a savant who could not use logic or reasoning…

An example is Phineas Gage, whose personality was altered from a railroad spike that was driven into his frontal lobe (Pandya, 2011). His dependable, honest, and likable character before the accident changed to an irresponsible, ill-mannered, and erratic person (Pandya…

high school. I had signed up for AP Psychology because I heard that it was a fun course. But a few months later, I delved into research about Phineas Gage, one of my favorite case studies of the course. Before taking Psychology, I would have classified myself as a biology person. So after years of learning how vital and how delicate the brain was, the fact Gage could survive after his accident was absolutely extraordinary. I soon became introspective after learning about his personality…

As neuroscience research progresses, the concept of the mind becomes of critical importance. The mind is usually considered to be a separate, nonmaterial entity compared to the physical neurons within the brain. However, the field of neuroscience is finding many connections between the physical nature of the brain and the supposed non-physical aspect of the human mind. In a sense, neuroscience seeks to understand the functioning of the mind in terms of the physical neuronal firings of the brain.…

Is it nature or nurture that define who a person is and why does he/she behave? This question has been asked throw centuries and people who tried to answer it had appealed to one or two sides and forgot about the others. First let us define nature and nurture. Nature things are ones that are genetically typed on our DNA - that means we had inherited it from our parents. On the other side, nurture are mostly things which are related to experience or learned through external factors. people who…

Jeffery Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Charles Manson are three very well known serial killers. Society has deemed these individuals crazy psychopaths for their violent crimes and behaviors. However, is there an underlying reason, or mechanism, that has influenced their behavior? More specifically, is there a region, or regions, of the brain that play a role in the planning and execution of violent crimes such as these? Researchers hypothesize that dysfunction in the frontal lobe region,…

1. Distinguish between afferent and efferent nerves. Afferent nerves are the sensory nerves. They carry information from the world to the brain and spinal cord. Efferent nerves are the motor nerves they carry information out of the brain and spinal cord to other parts of the body. Afferent nerves take in information and efferent nerves carry out information. 2. Study Figure 2.1. What makes up the Central Nervous System (CNS)? The central nervous system is made up of the brain and…

Another area of the brain affected by ASPD is the amygdala (Hancock, 2014, p. 149). The amygdala is located just between the ear and the eye on both sides of the head. This is the part of the brain that processes fear, as well as what causes a person to decide their aggression level. All senses that a person has communicate with the amygdala, so a lot of emotional processes interact with it, and it also decides what motivates a person to act in certain ways. The amygdala in someone who has been…

Specially, Gardner gave examples of areas of the brain such as the Broca’s and Wernicke area that were connected to specific functions of the brain. Phineas Gage (1823 – 1860) famous case of brain injury confirmed Gardner’s theory (Martinez, 2010). Through this famous case study of localized brain damaged due to an impelling metal rod through the brain, psychologist have been able to explore the different…

scientists have found that the region of great variation during teenaged period is the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is one of the most important parts of the human brain. People started to realize its function through the study of Phineas Gage case, a railroad worker who survived an iron bar passing through his head. In an accident, an iron bar ripped into his left cheek, passing through his left eyeball, then came out from the top of his head. Everyone thought he would die, but he…