Name: What If Part of Your Brain Was Missing?
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A region located inside the prefrontal cortex processes our emotions and helps regulate our behavior. What would happen if it were gone?

An injury cost Phineas Gage part of his brain, but he lost something else too.

What If Part of Your Brain Was Missing?

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A region located inside the prefrontal cortex processes our emotions and helps regulate our behavior. What would happen if it were gone?

An injury cost Phineas Gage part of his brain, but he lost something else too.

Body & Brain

What If Part of Your Brain Was Missing?Published: June 16, 2023Thalia Wheatley: Phineas Gage was a railroad foreman who was working in Vermont, and he was tamping down a hole that had gunpowder in it, and the gunpowder ignited, sending the rod through his eye, up through his brain, taking out a big patch of his brain in the process. At first people thought, well, this is a miracle. This man has been unscathed from this accident. He had memory, he had language, he had motor control. But of course, his friends noticed a difference.Luke Chang: His life fell apart. He had a hard time holding a job, he lost all of his friends and he really just struggled.Thalia Wheatley: His personality made him more fitful, irreverent and more profane. He was cursing a lot, lewd behavior. So, he had, sort of, no filter. We now know that the parts of the brain that he, sort of, surgically excised were involved in emotion and control.Heather Berlin: Over a hundred years later, neuroscientists mapped the regions of his brain that were harmed by that horrific accident. Areas of his prefrontal cortex, including the brain’s thermostat, were damaged, which might account for why he struggled socially. Our brain’s thermometer seems to be the insula.Luke Chang: But all that information needs to go somewhere else and be integrated with other types of information.Heather Berlin: That’s our brain’s thermostat, a region located inside the prefrontal cortex that processes our emotions and helps regulate our behavior. He couldn’t regulate his emotions or process how other people might react to his behavior.Thalia Wheatley: And that was the key moment, I think, in neuroscience history, when people realized, “Oh, it’s not just that motor, memory, language is in the brain, your personality is up there, your morality is up there, things that make you you are there.Heather Berlin: I think we all, kind of, know intuitively that emotions impact our decisions. So, what sort of extra information is this giving us?Luke Chang: In a lot of the scientific work that’s been done on studying emotion in decision making, people have really focused on how emotions may help, basically, lead us to make worse decisions and how it maybe even makes us, emotions make us irrational. And I, actually, don’t think that’s true. If you have a goal to not want to harm others and to, like, do what’s going to be in your self-interest, emotions are actually helping us make better decisions.

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What If Part of Your Brain Was Missing?

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Support Provided By

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What Happens in the Brain When you Sleepwalk?

Your Brain: Who's in Control?

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