In 1848, a railway foreman named Phineas Gage was packing explosives into rock when a spark sent a three and a half foot iron rod straight up through his cheek and out the top of his skull, and the strangest part of the story is not that he survived, but what happened to him afterward

In 1848, a railway foreman named Phineas Gage was packing explosives into rock when a spark sent a three and a half foot iron rod straight up through his cheek and out the top of his skull, and the strangest part of the story is not that he survived, but what happened to him afterward

Here’s the thing about the story of Phineas Gage. Almost everyone has heard some version of it. The railway foreman. The tamping iron. The impossible survival. The famous personality change. The line his friends supposedly said afterwards, that he was “no longer Gage.” It sits inside almost every introductory psychology textbook printed in the last hundred years, and it is used to teach one specific lesson, which is that the human personality li…