The mystery in a person's brain is pierced through his head

After the sharp iron rod pierced the head of a worker in the United States, he still drove himself home and lived for another 12 years.

Can a person who has a knife through his head go home?

Phineas Gage used to be a railroad worker in Vermont, USA. His daily task is to clear stones to place rails. If the stone is so big that it cannot be removed by hand, Gage must drill holes and use sharp iron bars to stuff explosives into the hole to break the stone, BBC said.

A portrait of the Phineas Gage is drawn after he gets the iron rod through his head.Hetook the iron bar causing the accident.(Photos: Wikipedia.)

But on September 13, 1848, the incident happened after Gage stuffed a hole in a rock near the town of Cavendish, Vermont. Gage's iron bar accidentally fell on the outside of the stone, creating a spark that caused the explosive block to burst. The blast caused the iron bar - about a meter long, 3 cm in diameter and 6kg in weight - stabbed into the 25-year-old's head. It pierced from the bottom of the left eye to the top of the head and fell in a position 30 meters from the stone.

According to the Huffington Post, John Harlow, the doctor was at the scene when he recalled that the iron bar was about a meter long, 3cm in diameter, weighs 6kg, "full of blood and brain . " It stabbed into the skull, pierced the left brain lobe, broke a significant portion of the brain and pushed the eyeball out of the Gage sockets. To the astonishment of all the witnesses, the foreman after the tragedy remained awake and quickly stood up and walked. He even stated that two more days will come back to break the rock.

Returning to the hotel room, Gage lay on the bed for Harlow to deal with the wound. The doctor shaved his scalp, bleeding the patient. He picked up small pieces of broken bones, repositioned large pieces of bone that were deflected by iron bars and wound the wound on the Gage's head with sticky straps. At 11pm, the boy stopped bleeding and went to sleep.

The next morning, Harlow allowed his family to visit the Gage. The patient recognized her mother and her uncle, which was a good sign. However, a few days later, the Gage fell into a semi-comatose state due to fungal brain infection. Fear of the worst happened, his family prepared the coffin. Harlow immediately operated on the Gage to remove pus from the wound through the nose. For several weeks, the patient's condition was more stable despite the complete loss of sight on the left. In January 1949, the man recovered completely. Talking about the process of taking care of the Gage, Harlow was humble: "God healed him".

Illustrating Gage's wound.(Photo: Van Horn JD, Irimia A, Torgerson CM, Chambers MC, Kikinis R, et al).

However, Gage's personality changes. Dr. Harlow described "mental expression" by the 25-year-old boy as follows: "The bosses who consider Gage the most effective foreman perceive the change in his mind to refuse to hire. Patient. become erratic, messy, vulgar, impatient, hesitant, outlined a series of plans and immediately give up if you see the other is more feasible. He seems to have been destroyed, his mind changed to the point that friends and acquaintances all commented that the Gage is no longer a Gage. " Some reports claim that the foreman permanently loses control of his ability to behave in a way that is inappropriate in many social, violent and "uncontrollable" situations to harass children.

In disagreement, psychologist Malcolm Macmillan from Deakin University (Australia) believes Gage's behavioral change in reality only lasts a short time."This case is worth remembering because it illustrates how a small story can be woven into a scientific mystery , " he wrote in An Odd Kind of Fame. This argument is strongly criticized. Before Macmillan, Dr. Henry Bigelow from Harvard University also claimed that the Gage "recovered both physically and mentally". He concluded that the patient's brain was perfectly normal because he still walked, talked, looked and listened. Later, it was discovered that Bigelow tests conducted on Gage only focused on feeling and movement, so it was not convincing enough.

In general, experts say it is difficult to confirm whether the Gage's personality has changed because very few people understand him so well that he can be sure of the personality of the man before the accident. On the other hand, the story is more likely to be complicated by the limited knowledge of brain injury at the time.

Iron bars pierce from below the left eye to the top of the Gage's skull.(Photo: BBC.)

For the scientific world at the time, the Gage accident was the first evidence that brain damage could affect human behavior and personality. But to this day, neurologists still have not adequately explained why the Gage did not die as soon as the iron bar pierced his skull.

Gage's health abruptly fell in 1859. He moved to San Francisco to live with his mother, brother-in-law and sister. Then he suffered from epilepsy and died in 1860.

7 years later his body was dug up at the request of Dr. Harlow. Today both his skull and sharp iron are displayed in Harvard Medical School in the United States . His name appears in many university curricula and scientific books and magazines.