What Really Happened to Phineas Gage?
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- Опубликовано: 1 янв 2025
- In 1848, Phineas Gage survived a seemingly unsurvivable injury to his brain, but the tale of that event has become quite colorful, and inaccurate, in many cases. So, what REALLY happened to Phineas Gage?
Hosted by: Hank Green
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"Hey Phineas. What was the last thing that went through your mind at the accident?"
"3.5 feet of iron."
masterimbecile YES. Thank you for this!
😂😂😂oh man! you're the boss
Ferb xd
no
that's it, this is the only joke that should exist
Well done. A compassionate and compelling approach to Gage's story.
"Everybody deserves to have their story told right." Strongly agree.
Agree with your agreement!
@@Roaryer Agree with your agreement, with your agreement!
I love how you actually talked about him. The person, who had a terrible painful accident. It's so important to humanize the people in history, otherwise they just become a number or case.
Nobody ever talks about his accident. Everyone only ever talks about him and his personality.
Oh yay, I get to talk about my big sister's golf ball sized hole in her brain! :D
My big sister, now aged 40, was hit and run over by a legally blind semi truck driver when she was 18 months old. The biggest thing people paid attention to as she grew up was her paralyzed, eventually amputated leg. But within the last couple years, doctors decided to check her brain since she was experiencing a lot of uncontrollable head and neck tremors. That's when they found the comparatively massive hole on her left frontal lobe. The doctor was the one who described it as "about the size of a golf ball". She had always had a scar on her head from her skull cracking at the initial impact, but doctors had been so focused on trying to salvage her badly damaged and infected leg, they just assumed the rest of her was fine.
Which, to be fair, she is! She is an incredibly happy and enthusiastic person, and a huge influence on my life growing up! She always had a lot of trouble with math, and she is psychologically stuck at about 17-19 years old, but I will always jump to share her awesome story of survival, especially to assure people of how much we humans can endure! ;D
Birdsong Thats crazy
Wow, amazing. Also funny how you are so enthusiastic about your sister having a huge hole in her brain but I get it
More enthusiastic about their sister’s life and personality, I’d say. Nothing funny about family love. :-)
I’d like to know how a legally blind person gets a job as a trucker 😤
OH MY GOODNESS PEOPLE ACTUALLY SAW AND LIKED MY COMMENT AAH THANK YOU I'm gonna double check with my sis in the morning to fact check myself just in case since I'm paranoid I assumed the wrong section of brain, the scar is on the front left side, but I'll double check! ;u; If there's any way for me to share pictures, at least of her brain scan, I'm sure she'd be pretty cool with it since I know if I read this story from some rando comment on RUclips, I probably wouldn't believe it. XD (gosh I'm sorry for dumb run on sentences hcidbcksd I'm really nervous about sounding like an idiot but I also love sharing this with people because this kind of medical/science stuff is so cool to me lol)
@Kevin Benoit While I think he probably should've known he wasn't safe to be driving, the one administering his sight test at the DMV guided him through it instead of putting their foot down. The State asked my parents if they wanted to press charges against the driver, but when a lawyer friend found out the DMV goofed too, they kind of just forgot about it as Big Sis more or less lived her first 15 years in hospitals. ^^; He did lose his job and license, though.
@Fake Name + @Kit Whitfield
While I definetely love my family, our sense of humor on the matter can be warped for sure. :'D When my sister brought back the scan and told us the full news about her brain injury, my little brother gasped and said "So you're a LITERAL airhead!" She smacked his shoulder with a crutch. uwu
I'm worried I'm rambling like an idiot I'm sorry I'm anxious sharing slightly more personal things because I know my family is weird as heck but I hope at least the science is cool to people?? 8'D
humans: slips in bath tub and perishes
also humans: has iron rod lauch trough brain and lives
I guess the lack of evidence makes his story hard to...gage...
That was a stretch but I don't regret it
but the impact he had went through the mental roof...
an even bigger stretch i suppose.
lmao
Ba dum tiss
You could say his experience was mind-blowing
One of Hank's 87 jobs is making sure everyone knows about Phineas Gage.
And Tuberculosis.
Huh i didnt know there were so many versions. Id only heard the accurate one
Same.
Me too
Same, I never heard these more ridiculous versions, interesting to see that some people thought these things.
Same, I din't even know that there were so many other versions
I too only heard the correct one lol
i heard he was a miner, so i was misinformed from the beginning
Haha, same here.
He was actually an adult
@@_KingOfCalifornia miner, not minor. someone who digs the ground for resources
@@7lllll I'm pretty sure he meant it as a joke.
Surely you'd have the other end of the rod pointing away from your head so to avoid injury if the rod gets ejected. I reminds me of when I saw a serial killer hit himself in the back with an axe because he didn't swing it right. You need to learn how to use tools properly, especially if using them a lot.
I find it hilarious his name is Gage, gauge being the unit of measure for round objects like canon balls, wire, and rods...
And train tracks
“I like trains”.
@@zombies4evadude24 I hate trains.
@@phineasgage9592 you will love
He was born for the role
Even so, if he was hard to work with after his accident, for pete's sake, what kind of PTSD must the guy have had? If I'd been just going through a ho-hum day at work and suddenly had a metal rod blown through any part of me, I might be a bit cranky and hard to get along with for a while afterwards, regardless of whether the rod went through my head or my foot.
I feel like all the people who suggest PTSD have never met anyone with PTSD, and just compared a list of symptoms without having the relevant competencies to use such diagnostic criteria.
If ignoring the evidence and facts to such a degree, why not say that the tamping rod was in fact a syphilitic penis and the personality change was symptomatic of both syphilis and of having your skull rogered.
@@HumanpersonRealname At the time there was no concept of PTSD so any such symptoms would have been explained as something else or dismissed. Any traumatic experience can make us react poorly even years later. He went through a probably very traumatizing accident and it stands to reason that he would have at least anxiety associated with the workplace. Maybe even PTSD since even today many sufferers goes undiagnosed.
@@HumanpersonRealname first recognition of PTSD came with Shell Shock, condition recognised during WW1, well over 50 years later
Was he even physically capable of having PTSD? I feel like that would be part of your frontal lobe since that controls emotions like fear, sadness, and anger and stuff, and his frontal lobe was definitely non functional
Surprisingly enough, we know for a fact that he actually had no anxiety or PTSD-like effects as a result of the accident. Dr. Harlow described Mr. Gage as very calm and even kind of witty about the situation... even while literally vomiting chunks of brain in the hours after the injury. He was reportedly rather eager to get back to work after recovering, but as was stated in the video it just wasn't really working out.
I just went to read about him, and a quote from the doctor says that he got up to vomit, and "a teacupful" of his brain just squeezed out the top of his head.
So that image will stay with me forever.
And now it will stay with me forever too 😬 definitely does not sound pleasant, for anyone involved
well that's lovely
I have always been interested in this story. My father had a brain tumor when I was a kid. So brain stuff and how the injuries can affect someone was so interesting. Even though I have read this story and even have a book about him I still watch videos when I see them. I appreciate how you incorporated some new info and such.
I'm glad that Hank got to host this video, seeing as he's been obsessed with Phineas Gage for at least the last 10 years.
What is called “a lethal injury”
Interesting to know the technical term for that
This episode really blew my mind
BOOO! Okay, fine.... Good one.
Booooooooo
Dumb
wait, so this isn't another Florida Man story?
Peter Houle: ShiaLeBeoufApplause.gif
giant rod flies through brain
brain: tis but a scratch
brain goes without oxygen for 4 whole minutes
brain: im not gonna make it, go on without me
I wonder if his attitude change had more to do with him being bitter about the injury and less to do with the injury itself
In a short backstory... I was electrocuted and drowned (all in one sitting)... AND there has been a noticeable (for me anyway) deficiency in some "mental departments"...
It IS worth pointing out that it's tough to remember a time when you were "better than this"... while you stare at a problem and feel the figurative "gears grinding" before you get to that solving part...
... IN my case, specifically, I was always profane as hell (even a bit obscene)... BUT the frustrations can account for the man being a degree more abrasive than his "old self"...
Then you take the people around him, who might see this behavior change and assume (?) that it's some residual bitterness for the inciting incident.
OR at the very least, the simplicity and profoundness of shock they might feel when this otherwise polite and publicly acceptable (socially conservative?) individual is suddenly prone to violently spewing obscenities at the top of his voice... the only "vent" for the frustration at hand.
I don't get bitter over the accident I had. It was an accident... Sh*t happens.
That does NOT help the frustrations when I can surely recall a time when some task was relatively simple, and yet, today I stare slack-jawed for several minutes "just wrapping my head around it" before I can do a damn thing.
At least, (thankfully) my right hand has finally stopped randomly dropping crap... or throwing it. THAT was annoying and occasionally dangerous as hell. ;o)
I would be mad about the injury, the lost of the job ( it was a respectful good job, and he was good at it) would be enough to turn me into the most bitter person.
Trauma, unemployiment, pain, shame, dude was stressed, depressed and anxious. Of course he would become someone else.
@@AndradeJessie my point exactly but better made.
This seems unlikely to me. According to Dr. Harlow's accounts he took the injury in stride, making sarcastic remarks about the situation even while he was choking out brains, and was eager to get back to work as quickly as possible.
One of those case studies where a horrific accident ended up while not good for Gage, unfortunately, good for humanity's understanding of ourselves.
i often ask, if you were phineas gage, and you could decide whether or not to get into the accident or not with the benefit of hindsight, which would you choose? my answer is yes, do get into the accident because it is so good for psychology, but no one agrees with me
@@7lllll I can see both sides. I'd appreciate being able to help science but I also would like my brain to work as it was designed to. I lean toward more toward having full brain function.
That's kind of the history of neuroscience. People incurring brain injuries, then through those injuries becoming the focus of research into how the brain works. From Phineas Gage, to Henry Molaison, to Clive Wearing. Aside from brain scans, how else can you study the active brain except through injuries?
@@Ngamotu83 I didn't say that those injuries haven't done good for science, just if given the choice, that I wouldn't choose to be injured like that
@@HistoryNerd808 Michael Gibbs didn't reply to your reply to my reply. he replied to your original comment
Thank you for posting this. I had an aneurysm in 2017. This was encouraging to see.
My favorite mis-retelling, is in a documentary about porn being the new drug. That Gage was distracted by pretty women and thats why he accidentally hit the bomb.
If I got a donut for every time I heard his name in my first 2 semesters of psychology, I could stop world hunger
A friend of mine suffered a traumatic brain injury from when an ex beat him nearly to death. His personality changed drastically. =/ He became more physically aggressive and short-tempered.
That's awful..I'm so sorry. If you don't mind my asking, did you notice the changes immediately or did they develop in the months after the injury? My bf and I were in an accident and he has a TBI. He's incredibly normal-seeming, just a bit cranky. The doctors say it's due to the pain he's in. I'm just wondering whether it will worsen with time. It's totally cool if you'd prefer not to share and I'm sorry, again, about your friend.
@@gennstaa1312 Sudden change, due to the nature and extent of the damage. He regularly suffers seizures now, that's how significant the damage was.
@@limalicious id like to beat his ex girlfriend
My father suffered a major stroke and had very similar changes including aggressiveness, irritability and being short tempered, along with becoming less emotionally perceptive. He’s still my dad but definitely not the same person that he was.
@@galatea742 makes me wonder if I would even wanna live a life like that. God forbid I ever suffered a major head injury I would just hope that it kills me
I fell 70 feet off a cliff and landed on a sheet of rock. But I’ve been able to recover very well (after a 2-3 month coma), and this answered a lot of questions for me as to how! Thank you!
Abby C hope your okay. Also how was the coma? Was it really as they say it is, that people wake up like it was yesterday?
Andriod Khan maybe medically induced comas are like that, but I felt like I had been asleep for years! The nurses asked if I knew what year it was, and I thought I had been out for a long time, so I said 2023. They thought I was crazy, but I was just confused! I’m okay now though, thank you!
I just wanted to take a second to say thank you for making this video. I've heard about this guy time and time and time again, and I didn't realize that I had so many facts wrong
I heard Phineas Gage had an amazing 104 day summer vacation with his brother, though unknown to the both of them their older sister was trying to get them into trouble over their daily projects.
They also had a pet duck-billed platypus who it turns out was a secret agent for an organisation without a cool acronym.
YESSS
stop the cap
why did that doctor sound so disappointed that he wasn't impaired?
"No Impairment..... WHATEVER"
My father suffered a major stroke and had somewhat similar changes including aggressiveness, irritability and being short tempered, along with becoming less emotionally perceptive. He’s still my dad but definitely not the same person that he was.
there was also a accident of a man with a hole in his stomach. 1822 a fur trappers gun went off. and medical doctors could look inside his stomach for years, it changed 100's of years of medical books.
What caliber was the bullet
It's really hard to gauge the reality of a situation when it takes such a mental stretch to wrap your head around.
I remember the very first time I heard about him. It was in a PBS _Nova_ episode about the brain, circa 1985-86. Even _Nova_ overemphasized the (apparently wrong) idea that he permanently lost most of his social skills!
WOW. I JUST FINISHED WRITING ABOUT THIS GUY IN MY FREE WILL VS DETERMINISM ESSAY. 😲
Meanwhile I'm expecting questions regarding Gage on my exam tomorrow so the timing really couldn't be better SciShow Psych.
Also I'm curious what you argued in your essay? The more I consider free will the less free it seems.
We don’t have free will, our brain decides to do things moments before we consciously think we decide to do them for ourselves. And literally every action we take is based on chemical reactions in our brain that tell us what we think is important.
@@xxXthekevXxx that is true to some extent, but you don't HAVE to act upon your impulses.for example Your mind will tell you that you need to eat, but if you wanted to you could make a choice to refrain from eating. It wouldn't be pleasant but fasting is something many people do. If you wanted you could even go on ignoring your body an mind right up until you die.
No mention of the song you wrote about this?
Daracaex +
I was looking through the comments to see if anyone had mentioned that!
@@samraffertymusic after i commented mine😂😝
A bad enough headache changes my personality too.... and quick.
“Everyone deserves to have their story told right.” Hank is full of wise words!
Happy to report we got the more accurate story. In fact I've never heard those myths before now
The brain is so resilient but when you get hit in the head you get all woozy
I first found out about this man and his story maybe five years ago, and every single time I revisit it I am more fascinated. It's a morbid and unnerving fascination, and I can't look at photos of him without shivering (largely because my mind insists on trying to imagine what that was like).
This newest thing, the 3D model of the skull, is both fascinating and amazing and also made me flinch.
How many times has vlogbrothers/scishow/etc done an episode on or in part about Gage?
I believe this is officially number 4, what with the song, the crash course episode, and the regular vlogbrothers video
6:28
Probably because white matter is more myelinated axons rather than soma neutron cell bodies. The soma can't regenerate, but all other parts lie the axon terminals, dendrites and axon can.
I have epilepsy and this is what I fear.Waking up from a seizure and being a different person
Ah! This was one of the stories that got me into psych!
The one thing I wish this video had more of is an accurate description of how the metal rod was used for packing in explosives. So many comments here act as though Gage did not know what he was doing lol
I'm taking a Cognitive Neuroscience class, and I'm SO excited to about the Phineas Gage case more in-depth. So, so fascinating.
Such an amazing story! I heard of this in a lecture and I HAD to look it up
"my baby is surprisingly smart" - typical dad :-)
As always, a brilliant & balanced presentation.
Yes his personality really changed. I'd say it happened between Con-Air and National Treasure...
Oh, wait. Phineas Gage? I meant Nicolas Cage.
@Dream Delirium
Why are we still here? Just to suffer? Every night, I can feel my leg... And my arm... even my fingers... The body I've lost... the comrades I've lost... won't stop hurting... It's like they're all still there. You feel it, too, don't you? I'm gonna make them give back our past!
@Dream Delirium True. I like that. "Here" is the only place anyone can ever be. Just like "now" is the only time that can exist. The past never happened and neither will the future.
Would it be a stretch to believe his personality wasn't changed from direct damage to the frontal lobe but because he was resentful to society because they looked at him differently for having a big hole in his head? Similar to amputy patients when they lose a limb...
i recently suffered an accident of sorts that has left me with a small but still noticable change in my behavior and personality and it sucks so bad to be able to remember a time when you were "not this" and just be bitter about the fact that the you you are now isnt the same you were before the stuff happened
“Gage moves to chili!”
It’s not pronounced chili, Hank, it’s Chile 😅
shhhhhhh, let the man dream
Dorvuzak Uzn chili _is_ delicious! 🌶
I liked this investigation type video. Keep up the great work!!!
Woah thank you so much for this video! I have not gotten much sleep lately, i could not stop thinking about what really happened to Phineas Gage.
One thing that should be mentioned is that accidents - especially as horrible as Gage's - also have the potential to change a personality, independent from the physical trauma.
Hank must do a Phineas Gage related project every so often, or he will turn into feathers and float away Forrest Gump style.
Where can I get that Button up Hank? Fr tho it looks awesome.
Someone should have asked his fellow railroad workers whether they considered him Standard or Narrow Gage.
But what *_gauge_* was the rod?
You may wanna set a title safe area in your future videos, some of the stuff are cut off while viewing this video on those newfangled phones with long skinny screens.
Where is Perry?
I imagine his co-workers tried stopping the blood flow with whatever dirty rags or bits of cloth by stuffing it in his head holes and the 19th Century Doctor/Barber fixing him up
5:50 My eyes'd bug out with a rod in my skull, too, buddy.
“Sir we’ve got a 10-1. We’ve got a man, missing his frontal lobe.”
Thank you. A really thorough and informative video about Gage's story.
Good to see the Green family is still at it. I used to watch a lot of their content.
I'm happy Hank did this one, otherwise I would have been on edge waiting for contradictions with his song and wondering "Does Hank know all this?"
When do I get added to a story about recovery from brain injuries?
Nice shirt!
i came here from crash course philosophy. i never expected that i'd see hank here again
Mr Clarke brought me here
Well said. Bravo!
I really love the humane approach you guys and gals give to science :) Love from Chile xoxo ♥
Any time I'm having a bad day, I just remind myself: "At least I don't have an iron rod in my head!"
Did anyone else learn this story from Hank’s song about it?
I know it probably wouldn’t be super scientific (so maybe more suited to one of your other channels) but PLEASE make a video about smart things Oren does
This guy is probably the most entertaining knowledge guy.
From that day on, Phineas could no longer think of what to do every day.
Funny, and people die from a few hits on the head, a few bumps.. heck even a bullet that goes thru the head and LEAVES is 99.9999% sure to kill you.. but a huge pipe or whatever didn't kill him.
What a story... what a superhuman.
If only everyone was like him. I swear we are too fragile.
Finally a confirmation of the story that Gage ended up fine and with good sociable skills despite his accident.
He survived and became a legend, that's what happened lol
Even more recent cases show how resilient the human brain is, such as Malala Yousafzai to Gabby Giffords. Both of them were shot through the head, and both survived.
They survived, but Gabby Giffords still struggles with a lot of things and her speech is very clearly different.
Very good video👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Yes but what about his brother Pherb?
I was taught in school that he fell out of a window and landed on a fence rod.
A level psychology anyone?
I like that Hank was the host for this particular topic :D
Hank, you are really obsessed by this guy! 😂 Don't blame you...
Wow, another spectacular video!
I’ve read all I could about him for decades. Surprisingly, I had heard none of the outlandish stories you cited. That said, in the first account I ever read, it related that while he was very changed in temperament (volatile where once mature for his age, reserved, composed), another change about him post-spike was that wild animals would come out of the forest, drawn by him, wonderously. Oh, and fact: his spike is on display at Harvard.
Hank, how many times are you going to make a video about Phineas Gage? Answer: every time I watch a video about Phineas Gage.
Was he left a cyclops or did the rod completely bypass his eye?
Shameless Orin plug, I approve. +50 dad points
CC's?
Something I don't want to happen to me lol
You would probably die in an instant so i don't think you should care
If something like this happens you are dead anyway
@@robinlikesgames4167 I'm guessing he doesn't want to be dead, then.
Hank, why didn’t you sing the song? I was very disappointed that I didn’t get to hear Phineas Gage. It would’ve been the best time to include it.
"Phineas Gage was 25 years old in 1848, and he liked his job working at the railroad, but he had another fate."
"He was blasting rock when something distracted him, and he forgot to put the damping sand in"
He shoved the tamping rod into that little hole onto the blasting powder.
and suddenly his entire left frontal lobe had been turned into clam chowder.
His personality change is understated here.
My Psychologist teacher in high school always taught this early on. He always paused the video right when the rod goes through his head.
life : Boom road through the skull !
Human Brain : i beg to differ sir .