Neuroscience
It's a remarkable, mythical tale with lashings of gore – no wonder it's a favourite of psychology students the world over. I'm talking about Phineas Gage, the nineteenth century railway worker who somehow survived the passing of a three-foot long tamping iron through the front of his brain and out the top of his head. What happened to him next?
If you turn to many of the leading introductory psychology textbooks (American ones, at least), you'll find the wrong answer, or a misleading account. Richard Griggs, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida, has just analysed the content of 23 contemporary textbooks (either released or updated within the last couple of years), and he finds most of them contain distortions, omissions and inaccuracies.
It needn't be so. Thanks to painstaking historical analysis of primary sources (by Malcolm Macmillan and Matthew Lena) – much of it published between 2000 and 2010 – and the discovery during the same time period of new photographic evidence of post-accident Gage (see image, right), it is now believed that Gage made a remarkable recovery from his terrible injuries. He ultimately emigrated to Chile where he worked as a horse-coach driver, controlling six horses at once and dealing politely with non-English speaking passengers. The latest simulations of his injury help explain his rehabilitation – it's thought the iron rod passed through his left frontal lobe only, leaving his right lobe fully intact.
Yet, the textbooks mostly tell a different story. Of the 21 that cover Gage, only 4 mention the years he worked in Chile. Only three detail his mental recovery. Fourteen of the books tell you about the first research that attempted to identify the extent of his brain injuries, but just four of the books give you the results from the most technically advanced effort, published in 2004, that first suggested his brain damage was limited to the left frontal lobe (watch video). Only 9 of the books feature either of the two photos to have emerged of Gage in recent times.
So the textbooks mostly won't tell you about Gage's rehabilitation, or provide you with the latest evidence on his injuries. Instead, you might hear how hear never worked again and became a vagrant, or that he became a circus freak for the rest of his life, showing off the holes in his head. "The most egregious error," says Griggs, "seems to be that Gage survived for 20 years with the tamping iron embedded in his head!".
Does any of this matter? Griggs argues strongly that it does. There are over one and half million students enrolled in introductory psychology courses in the US alone, and most of them are introduced to the subject via textbooks. We know from past work that psychology textbook coverage of other key cases and studies is also often distorted and inaccurate. Now we learn that psychology's most famous case study is also misrepresented, potentially giving a misleading, overly simplistic impression about the effects of Gage's brain damage. "It is important to the psychological teaching community to identify inaccuracies in our textbooks so that they can be corrected, and we as textbook authors and teachers do not continue to 'give away' false information about our discipline," Griggs concludes.
_________________________________
Griggs, R. (2015). Coverage of the Phineas Gage Story in Introductory Psychology Textbooks: Was Gage No Longer Gage? Teaching of Psychology, 42 (3), 195-202 DOI: 10.1177/0098628315587614
--further reading--
Phineas Gage - Unravelling the Myth
Coverage of Phineas Gage in "Great Myths of the Brain"
Glimpsed at last - the life of neuropsychology's most important patient (Monsieur Leborgne)
Foundations of Sand - the lure of academic myths and their place in classic psychology.
Looking back: Blasts from the past
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Social Psychology Textbooks Ignore All Modern Criticisms Of Milgram's "obedience Experiments"
Some classic psychology experiments, known and discussed far beyond the discipline, have become modern-day myths. Accounts of what happened are frequently simplified and distorted to better convey a powerful revelation about human nature. A perfect example:...
- Neuroscience Still Haunted By Phineas Gage
From Van Horn et al 2012Seven years after his death, Phineas Gage's body was dug out of the ground and his skull passed to a doctor, John Harlow, who'd treated him in life. Although Gage's brain had long-since decayed, his skull remained intact...
- Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Phineas Gage, Kitty Genovese, Little Albert, And Other Classic Psychological Tales
The latest issue of The Psychologist magazine has just been published online and it features two open-access articles (here and here) that together drag psychology's classic tales out from the back of the cupboard, dust them down and cast them in...
- There Will Always Be Phineas
One of neuropsychology's and behavioral neuroscience's favorite historical case studies, Phineas Gage, is featured in this week's (02 December 2004) New England Journal of Medicine's "Images in Clinical Medicine" section, with two free-access...
- More About The Accidental Mind
Emily points me to a recent Boing Boing post on free neural notecards from David Linden's Accidental Mind blog (Linden is the author of the Accidental Mind, blogged here back in April). If you like brain science, you'll love these images! My favorite...
Neuroscience
What the textbooks don't tell you about psychology's most famous case study
 |
| Image: Photograph by Jack Wilgus of a daguerreotype of Phineas Gage in the collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus. |
If you turn to many of the leading introductory psychology textbooks (American ones, at least), you'll find the wrong answer, or a misleading account. Richard Griggs, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida, has just analysed the content of 23 contemporary textbooks (either released or updated within the last couple of years), and he finds most of them contain distortions, omissions and inaccuracies.
It needn't be so. Thanks to painstaking historical analysis of primary sources (by Malcolm Macmillan and Matthew Lena) – much of it published between 2000 and 2010 – and the discovery during the same time period of new photographic evidence of post-accident Gage (see image, right), it is now believed that Gage made a remarkable recovery from his terrible injuries. He ultimately emigrated to Chile where he worked as a horse-coach driver, controlling six horses at once and dealing politely with non-English speaking passengers. The latest simulations of his injury help explain his rehabilitation – it's thought the iron rod passed through his left frontal lobe only, leaving his right lobe fully intact.
 |
| Image: From Van Horn et al 2012 |
So the textbooks mostly won't tell you about Gage's rehabilitation, or provide you with the latest evidence on his injuries. Instead, you might hear how hear never worked again and became a vagrant, or that he became a circus freak for the rest of his life, showing off the holes in his head. "The most egregious error," says Griggs, "seems to be that Gage survived for 20 years with the tamping iron embedded in his head!".
Does any of this matter? Griggs argues strongly that it does. There are over one and half million students enrolled in introductory psychology courses in the US alone, and most of them are introduced to the subject via textbooks. We know from past work that psychology textbook coverage of other key cases and studies is also often distorted and inaccurate. Now we learn that psychology's most famous case study is also misrepresented, potentially giving a misleading, overly simplistic impression about the effects of Gage's brain damage. "It is important to the psychological teaching community to identify inaccuracies in our textbooks so that they can be corrected, and we as textbook authors and teachers do not continue to 'give away' false information about our discipline," Griggs concludes.
_________________________________
Griggs, R. (2015). Coverage of the Phineas Gage Story in Introductory Psychology Textbooks: Was Gage No Longer Gage? Teaching of Psychology, 42 (3), 195-202 DOI: 10.1177/0098628315587614
--further reading--
Phineas Gage - Unravelling the Myth
Coverage of Phineas Gage in "Great Myths of the Brain"
Glimpsed at last - the life of neuropsychology's most important patient (Monsieur Leborgne)
Foundations of Sand - the lure of academic myths and their place in classic psychology.
Looking back: Blasts from the past
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Social Psychology Textbooks Ignore All Modern Criticisms Of Milgram's "obedience Experiments"
Some classic psychology experiments, known and discussed far beyond the discipline, have become modern-day myths. Accounts of what happened are frequently simplified and distorted to better convey a powerful revelation about human nature. A perfect example:...
- Neuroscience Still Haunted By Phineas Gage
From Van Horn et al 2012Seven years after his death, Phineas Gage's body was dug out of the ground and his skull passed to a doctor, John Harlow, who'd treated him in life. Although Gage's brain had long-since decayed, his skull remained intact...
- Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Phineas Gage, Kitty Genovese, Little Albert, And Other Classic Psychological Tales
The latest issue of The Psychologist magazine has just been published online and it features two open-access articles (here and here) that together drag psychology's classic tales out from the back of the cupboard, dust them down and cast them in...
- There Will Always Be Phineas
One of neuropsychology's and behavioral neuroscience's favorite historical case studies, Phineas Gage, is featured in this week's (02 December 2004) New England Journal of Medicine's "Images in Clinical Medicine" section, with two free-access...
- More About The Accidental Mind
Emily points me to a recent Boing Boing post on free neural notecards from David Linden's Accidental Mind blog (Linden is the author of the Accidental Mind, blogged here back in April). If you like brain science, you'll love these images! My favorite...