Phineas Gage neuroscience case: True story of famous frontal lobe patient is better than textbook accounts.

The first story that appeared about Gage contained a mistake. The day after his accident, a local newspaper misstated the diameter of the rod. A small error, but an omen of much worse to come.

Psychologist and historian Malcolm Macmillan, currently at the University of Melbourne, has been chronicling mistakes about Gage for 40 years. He has had a peripatetic career: Among other topics, he has studied disabled children, Scientology, hypnosis, and fascism. In the 1970s, he got interested in Gage and decided to track down original material about the case. He turned up alarmingly little, and realized just how rickety the evidence was for most of the science about Gage.

Macmillan has been sifting fact from fiction ever since, and he eventually published a scholarly book about Gage’s story and its afterlife, An Odd Kind of Fame. Although slowed by a faulty hip replacement—he has trouble reaching books on the bottom shelves at libraries now—Macmillan continues to fight for Gage’s reputation, and he has gotten so involved with his subject that he now refers to him, familiarly, as Phineas. Above all, Macmillan stresses the mismatch between what we actually know about Gage and the popular understanding of him: “Despite there being no more than a couple hundred words attesting to how he changed, he came to dominate thinking about the function of the frontal lobes.”

[,,,]
Bigelow’s assessment meshed well with the medical consensus at the time, which held that the frontal lobes didn’t do much—in part because people could suffer grave injuries to them and walk away. Scientists now know that parts of the frontal lobes contribute to nearly every activity inside the brain. The forefront of the lobes, called the prefrontal area, plays an especially important role in impulse control and planning.

But even today scientists have only a vague idea of how the prefrontal lobes exercise that control. And victims of prefrontal injuries can still pass most neurological exams with flying colors. Pretty much anything you can measure in the lab—memory, language, motor skills, reasoning, intelligence—seems intact in these people. It’s only outside the lab that problems emerge. In particular, personalities might change, and people with prefrontal damage often betray a lack of ambition, foresight, empathy, and other ineffable traits. These aren’t the kind of deficits a stranger would notice in a short conversation. But family and friends are acutely aware that something is off.

[,,,]
In particular, Macmillan suggests that Gage’s highly regimented life in Chile aided his recovery. People with frontal-lobe damage often have trouble completing tasks, especially open-ended tasks, because they get distracted easily and have trouble planning. But in Chile Gage never had to plan his day: Prepping the coach involved the same steps every morning, and once he hit the road, he simply had to keep driving forward until it was time to turn around. This routine would have introduced structure into his life and kept him focused.



Phineas Gage neuroscience case: True story of famous frontal lobe patient is better than textbook accounts.

Pseudoscience and psychopathy

Last month I posted concerning the original article, pondering whether I would want to know. The following article brings to light some interesting points in rebuttal, that I should have considered, but didn't.

• I was curious as to how a single brain scan from an unrelated study could predict psychopathic behavior.
• I was confused on why Dr. Fallon was comparing his brain scan from an Alzheimer’s study to an unrelated study about psychopaths. Did they do the same task in each study?
• A crucial issue with Dr. Fallon’s story is that we can’t even critique such an experimental design because he wasn’t even doing any sort of morality study! So to say that less frontal and temporal activity equals less morality is a gross oversimplification to begin with and there isn’t even any details to support such a claim.
• ,,,comparing a single brain scan from one study to an aggregate of brain scans from an entirely different study isn’t just wrong, it’s unethical.
• This is a classic example of poor scientific journalism and I believe it became so popular due to widespread deficits in scientific literacy. You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to see that there are huge problems with his story. You simply have view this story objectively have a healthy dose of skepticism without quickly deferring to the authority figure.
• ,,,the news articles covering his story do not provide enough details to support his claims. I find it rather troubling that no one is even addressing this

Pseudoscience and psychopathy

The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath | Surprising Science

Would you want to know?? The article and comments raise some interesting questions: freewill, nature/nurture, genetics, empathy, morality, and research ethics,,,

One afternoon in October 2005, neuroscientist James Fallon was looking at brain scans of serial killers. As part of a research project at UC Irvine, he was sifting through thousands of PET scans to find anatomical patterns in the brain that correlated with psychopathic tendencies in the real world.

“I was looking at many scans, scans of murderers mixed in with schizophrenics, depressives and other, normal brains,” he says. “Out of serendipity, I was also doing a study on Alzheimer’s and as part of that, had brain scans from me and everyone in my family right on my desk.”

“I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological,” he says, noting that it showed low activity in certain areas of the frontal and temporal lobes linked to empathy, morality and self-control. Knowing that it belonged to a member of his family, Fallon checked his lab’s PET machine for an error (it was working perfectly fine) and then decided he simply had to break the blinding that prevented him from knowing whose brain was pictured. When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own.

Many of us would hide this discovery and never tell a soul, out of fear or embarrassment of being labeled a psychopath. Perhaps because boldness and disinhibition are noted psychopathic tendencies, Fallon has gone all in towards the opposite direction, telling the world about his finding in a TED Talk, an NPR interview and now a new book published last month, The Psychopath Inside. In it, Fallon seeks to reconcile how he—a happily married family man—could demonstrate the same anatomical patterns that marked the minds of serial killers.

The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath | Surprising Science