Who was Phineas Gage? What the textbooks get wrong about his famous brain injury

Today we're talking about Phineas Gage and his traumatic brain injury. The textbooks all say he had a major change in personality, but sometimes the truth is more complicated. We look at the real case, but also look at how other people with facial trauma cope with the change, and we talk about how real stories become myths, legends, and tall tales to help teach psychology.

Further Reading:

[sateIIitepilot]

Good point but, it could also be that those were his initial side effects and that it took him months to recover and after a year he had re-learned how to en-'gage' with the world around him. Pun intended.

[sharonayouabian]

I was always wondering about that. i though he might have suffered from PTSD after the accident. Thank you for the great info.

[AndrewB]

He was 36 when he died, with Brain injuries in which I as well suffer? A Severe Traumatic Brain Injury? We don’t necessarily live long, our mind’s deteriorate and we develop Alzheimer’s and Dementia and Parkinson’s, it’s unfortunate and uncomfortable, I forget who I am or what I did a lot

[ASM]

You should do a video on the urban legend of the guy who did LSD and believed he turned into an Orange. He spent the rest of his days in fear of being “peeled”.

[ArcaneHistoryBites]

I am the only live witness who saw what happened that day, and I am not telling anything about it!

[allwaizeright]

I'm not sure where that info came from - From everything I read he had a minor change in personality...

[kkaplinski]

I thought he got it stabbed through the bottom of his head and it came out through the top of his head?

[nanaallman]

What the heck… I thought what happened was this guy fell off a train bed and needed medicine so his doctor prescribed him radium water. He drank so much radium water that he eventually died. Is this real life?

[offense]

Thank you read a bunch of articles most of them described what you were saying.