Ep. 58: The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste

In 1848, a railroad foreman in Vermont leaned over a blasting hole, turned his head for one second, and sent a 13-pound iron rod straight through his skull. Minutes later, he was sitting up and cracking jokes with the doctor.

Phineas Gage is the most famous patient in neuroscience, the man who was “no longer Gage.” He’s in nearly every psychology textbook ever printed. And much of what those textbooks say about him is wrong.

This week, Crystal walks Andrea through the accident, the country doctor who kept Phineas alive with no antibiotics and a coffin already measured, and the paragraph that made him a legend twenty years later. Then come the parts the textbooks leave out: a photograph found on Flickr, a skull at Harvard, and a life that didn’t go the way you were taught.