Over a century ago, in the fall of 1848, an epochal event occurred. Phineas Gage, a "shrewd, smart businessman," got into an industrial accident that altered his life forever. A 43 inch-long tamping iron pierced through his left check and through his skull. The tamping iron was later found over one hundred feet away from the accident.

The fascination of this event was the miraculous recovery Gage endured. Unfortunately, though his life was not lost, his soul was. Gage was no longer the "energetic and persistent" man he was before. He could no longer socialize with his peers or anyone else for that matter. He had lost all ability to perceive society. Instead, Gage became a violent, compulsive and aggressive individual, and people were warned to stay away from him.

Scientists now believe that emotions interfere with rational thinking. They believe that emotion is linked to the brain to create logical decision making (more largely dealt with social interactions). Without several emotions, it may be impossible to create or even have developed feelings. To study this more intimately, scientists collected Gage's X-rays and evaluated them as neuroscientists recreated the tamping iron's path through Gage's head.

The X-rays showed that Gage's prefrontal cortex had been sliced (and diced) by the iron. Perhaps this may explain Gage's behavior after the accident. Gage's behavior was compared to brain tumor patients as well as psychoneurosis victims, etc. Antonio Damasio, MD, of the University of Iowa (also the author of Descartes' Error) says of Gage's incident, "Compromised Phineas's ability to conduct himself according to the social rules he previously had learned, to decide on the course of action that ultimately would be most advantageous to his survival and to plan for the future."

It is more than likely that victims of prefrontal cortex malfunction, like Gage, suffer from the disability to make social decisions because the prefrontal cortex is the area of emotion and reason. Though the victims are still highly intelligent, they are socially impaired because their "emotion-processing machinery" malfunctioned or shut down, keeping them from being able to project or develop feeling or reason. So far, reason and emotion seem to be inseparable.

Bibliography:
Marano, Hara Estroff. "More Doom For Descartes." Psychology Today. November/December. 1994: pp. 8-9.