Unlocking the Secrets of the Brain

The iron rod not only did not kill Gage, at first it did not even seem to have hurt him much, except that it cost him an eye. He moved and talked without difficulty, his memory was fine, he could still work, and his intellect appeared unaltered. But the brain damage Gage suffered did work a Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation on his personality. He changed from a kindly, cheerful, sensible, and intelligent family man, efficient and popular at work, into a profane and eviltempered drinker, a pigheaded, willful, lazy, inconsiderate liar. Luckily for neuroscience, his physician recorded Gage's personality changes, generating some of our earliest insights into how specialized functions are distributed in various parts of the brain. And Gage continues to contribute to neuroscience's growing body of knowledge. Scientists recently studied his skull using one of the many new methods and technologies for investigating the brain. Among the benefits of these technologies is that most of them are noninvasive-they pry open the black box of the brain, not with cranial