Jackson then asked after her son’s mental state. She replied that for the first few days after the accident her son was ‘childish’, but now he was back to his old self – except his memory was impaired. ‘A stranger would notice nothing peculiar’, she told Dr Jackson, but she did and so did the rest of the family.
Clearly, Phineas Gage after the accident was not the same man as before. Brain damage changed who he was, but did it extinguish who he was? Did it reveal for our edification some ancestral primate? Not for Phineas’s family at least. They saw in him the same industrious young man he had always been, eager to get on, and so impatient to be well again that he even ploughed a field before he was fully recovered. He was also, it seems, anxious to retain the hard-won status of blasting foreman, even if it meant he had to travel the sixty-five miles from Enfield to Montpelier in hopes of finding a firm who would hire him despite his disfigurement and, uh, track record.
This, then, is the raving wild man of neuroscientific myth, the worthless vagabond with absolutely no moral sense. Ramachandran’s belief in a mythology unsupported by evolutionary biology commits him to a version of events unsupported by the historical record. If Phineas Gage isn’t a worthless vagabond, then we have to abandon the Supermax Myth, the bridge between psychology and neurobiology, and completely rethink our conception of the brain. At this point Ramachandran’s acolytes helpfully suggest: ‘An Open Prison, perhaps?’ At which point one can only smile politely, tip one’s hat and bid them each good day.
In her brilliant essay Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson singles out for attention the ‘oddly stereotyped way’ in which brain books handle the issue of Phineas Gage’s swearing as if this somehow showed that the beast within had escaped. This is especially odd, she says, as what could be more human than swearing? So far as we know we are the only animals that do it.
That said, it will be a sad day if we finally decipher low frequency whale music only to discover that humpback whales are hurling long drawn-out expletives across the ocean at each other:
‘Yyeeewwww waaaaaannnkkkaaaaahhhhh!’
‘Yeeeeewww ffffuuuucckkkkkiiiinnggg bbaaaaassssttttaaaaaaard!’
To complement her argument, I’d just like to add another reason why I think the neuroscientific literature’s fixation on Gage’s swearing is odd. Railway navvies were as famously foul-mouthed as mule skinners. If a man was swearing among a gang of navvies, who would notice?
In 1838, an engineer working on the London-Birmingham Railway, said that English navvies were:
Possessed of all the daring recklessness of the Smuggler, without any of his redeeming qualities, their ferocious behaviour can only be equaled by the brutality of their language.
In The Railway Navvies, Terry Coleman puzzles over why there are not more reprints of Amercian navvy worksongs, and concludes that the songs were so sweary and blasphemous that they were ‘considered unprintable and so were lost’.
And yet every telling of the Phineas Gage story says that his co-workers were shocked by his swearing, and always includes the following po-faced quote from a navvy: ‘Gage isn’t the same Gage anymore’. These Blushing Railroad Workers of Vermont come across like Monty Python’s lumberjacks, who skip and jump and like to press wild flowers.
There is in fact a very good reason why contemporary observers attached great significance to Gage’s swearing. But this dramatic significance is lost to us so long as we use anachronisms like orbitofrontal cortex, ventromedial frontal lobe, or pre-frontal cortex. What the iron bar destroyed was not the ventromedial frontal lobe, but the Organ of Veneration, for the 1850s were the heyday of phrenology.
The Organ of Veneration
If we keep in mind that Phineas Gage’s Organ of Veneration has been destroyed, then the focus on his gross profanity begins to make sense. It wasn’t the swearing that got everyone’s attention, it was the swearing in front of his betters. No-one cares what oaths low people hurl at each other, but when ushered into the presence of someone venerable like Henry Bigelow, Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, you keep a civil tongue in your head. To swear where you should venerate is a shocking abrogation of fundamental social norms, like a soldier patting his commanding officer on the bottom and saying, ‘What’s with all this ordering about, love? If you want to get on in this world, ask nicely.’
The Organ of Veneration is located front and centre on the phrenology chart, one of the largest single areas of the brain, a Spain to the Portugal of the Organ of Human Nature, for example. The Organ of Veneration’s pride of place reflects a nineteenth century concern with hierarchy and rank. No veneration, no order.
In the nineteenth century, phrenology was not the quackery it later became, but the cutting edge of neuroscience. Phineas Gage’s disaster allowed nineteenth-century medical science to refine the phrenological map. To this end, Dr John Harlow conducted an experiment to test the damage to his Organ of Comparison, which was close to the Organ of Veneration and as such lay in the tamping iron’s flight path.
Finding Phineas playing catch with a handful of pebbles, Dr Harlow offered to buy four of the pebbles from him for one thousand dollars. Gage politely declined the offer, possibly fearing that the doctor had suffered irreversible damage to his Organ of Comparison.
For great apes dollar bills and pebbles are equally meaningless. The Organ of Comparison lay in the part of the forehead that apes do not have. Dr Harlow is literally seeing how far from the human state into apehood Phineas has fallen. He is playing a kind of Ker-plunk of the brain: how many phrenological sticks can be removed before humanity falls away completely and we have a bipedal ape? Phineas Gage offered a particularly good starting place for such an inquiry by dint of his profession, because even in full health, the navvy was popularly, if half-seriously, describe as the missing link between apes and humans:
With fury and frenzy and fear,
That his strength might endure for a span,
From birth, through beer to bier,
The link ‘twixt the ape and the man.
‘The Navvy Chorus’, Songs of a Navvy (1912).
What did Dr Harlow make of Gage’s waving away a grand? Did he take it to prove that, whatever else the tamping iron wrecked, at least Phineas’s fundamental decency was still intact? Was this evidence that the accident hadn’t damaged his patient’s Organ of Conscientiousness (which was located halfway between the Organs of Sublimity and Firmness)? Alas, no. What Dr Harlow concluded was that Phineas Gage’s refusal to trade gravel for dollars demonstrated an inability to compare worth and worthlessness, which therefore proved that the Organ of Comparison was destroyed by the tamping iron, which means it must be just where the phrenological map said it was. One of the crucial barriers between ape and man was down.
Even allowing for the fact that phrenology – or Bumpology as its detractors called it – was considered by advocates such as Dr Harlow to be The One True Science of the Mind, I find this a puzzling conclusion. If Phineas Gage doesn’t know the meaning of money, if he thinks gravel is as good as gold, then why travel sixty-five miles to Montpelier for that job interview? Why get any kind of job at all, for that matter, when there’s so much valuable gravel lying about all over the place, just there for the taking?
How I wish Phineas Gage had pocketed those ten green hundred-dollar bills, tapped the side of his nose, and said: ‘And there’s plenty more where these pebbles come from, Doc!’ At that point Dr Harlow, blinking down at his palm and the four $250 dollar pebbles he now owned would say:
‘Actually it was just
