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 October
15, 2002
In "Make Up Your Mind," scientists attempt
to reconstruct the injuries sustained by Phineas Gage on September
13th, 1848. Gage was a twenty-five-year-old railroad foreman
when a blasting accident drove a three-foot-long iron spike
clear through Gage's skull. The rod entered just below Gage's
left cheek and exited out the top of his head, landing some
25 yards away smeared with blood and brain matter.
Remarkably, Gage's wounds were not fatal. In fact, he never
even lost consciousness. Though it would take him several
months to recover from the injuries and subsequent infections,
Gage would live another twelve years, working to support himself.
Yet his friends would recall that from that September day
onward, Gage "was not Gage." Though his body healed, his personality
had changed. The once-respected young man was now described
as "fitful," "impatient and obstinate," and "grossly profane."
The
extraordinary case of Phineas Gage was the first to make the
connection between the brain and personality quite so clear.
In "Make Up Your Mind," Alan meets scientists who study a
range of human behaviors - from a baby's attempts to find
a hidden toy, to an adult's ability to make life or death
choices. Their goal is to determine which parts of the brain
play a role in the decision-making process. Underlying this
research is the presumption that different regions of the
brain control different cognitive functions. Today's advanced
imaging and modeling technologies provide ample evidence of
this "functional localization," but the notion was a radical
one when physiologists first began seriously studying the
human brain more than two hundred years ago. It took a now-discredited
pseudoscience to pave the way for today's sophisticated neuroscience.
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A
Partitioned Mind
In
1810, Franz Josef Gall and his colleague Johann Spurzheim
published their seminal work, "The Anatomy and Physiology
of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular."
In it, Gall, a respected Austrian physician, laid out the
fundamentals of the science he called "Cranioscopy," which
correlated external physical features of the skull to personality
traits.
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As a youth, Gall noticed that that physical features
seemed to reflect emotional and intellectual qualities.
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Gall
had been ruminating on the notion that physical features reflected
emotional and intellectual qualities since he was a youth.
He noticed that students with large eyes seemed to have more
academic aptitude than their smaller-eyed peers. Later, as
a student of medicine, Gall began taking skull measurements
of friends, colleagues and patients. From his careful analyzed
data, Gall developed detailed skull
charts.
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believed features of the skull revealed character traits
of individuals. |
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Gall
believed he'd found a region on the skull that correlated
to each of 27 personality traits, ranging from musical talent
to mathematical ability to "Theosophy," or one's sense of
God and religion. The shape of the head and the size of each
specific region of the skull - measured with the hands or
calipers, then compared to Gall's head charts - indicated
the relative development of each trait. A full cranioscopy,
somewhat akin to an astrological reading, would reveal one's
true personality, help one discover strengths and weakness,
and take the mystery out of who might make a compatible spouse
or business partner.
Though Galls' head charts would eventually fall out of scientific
favor, this notion of functional localization opened the door
for modern neuroscience. All of Gall's work rested on the
assumption not only that the brain is the organ of the "mind"
or personality, but also that the brain itself is organized
into smaller sections, each responsible for separate talents
and tendencies.
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Gall's ideas so offended the sensibilities of the
day, that Gall was forced to leave his native Austria
in 1805.
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When
Gall began publicly lecturing on cranioscopy in 1796, this
was a conceptual leap many of Gall's contemporaries were not
ready to make.
"Historically, for hundreds of years -maybe from the medieval
period even - there was the belief that the "mind" and soul
could not be partitioned," says Robert H. Wozniak, professor
of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. "It came
from a variety of theological beliefs."
In fact, Gall's ideas so offended the sensibilities of the
day, that Gall was forced to leave his native Austria in 1805.
Gall and his German protégé Spurzheim traveled for two years
before settling in Paris. Ironically, their exile and subsequent
wanderings would only ensure Gall's new science would catch
on all over western Europe and the United States.
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