
The Man Who Felt Nothing After His Frontal Lobe Vanished
In 1848, a railroad worker named Phineas Gage survived an iron rod blasting through his skull — but the polite, reliable man his friends knew was gone. This is the story of how one accident became the founding case for everything we believe about personality living in the brain.
Listen in the Fylom app.
Primary medical reports by John Martyn Harlow (1848, 1868).
Henry J. Bigelow's 1850 interpretation of Gage's recovery.
Modern 2012 neural reconstruction of the tamping iron trajectory.
The 'Social Recovery Hypothesis' regarding Gage's time in Chile.
- 01Intro1 min
- 02The Cavendish Incident2 min
- 03The Battle of the Reports2 min
- 04Mapping the Self2 min
- 05The Myth of the Ruined Man2 min
- 06Outro1 min
- Phineas Gage - Wikipedia
- Phineas Gage's great legacy - PMC - NIH
- Phineas Gage – Unravelling the myth | BPS
- “No longer Gage”: an iron bar through the head - PMC
- Reading About Phineas Gage
- Phineas Gage and the enigma of the prefrontal cortex
- the American crowbar case and nineteenth-century ...
- Frontiers | Neuroscience Education Begins With Good Science: Communication About Phineas Gage (1823–1860), One of Neurology’s Most-Famous Patients, in Scientific Articles
- The Famous Case of Phineas Gage's Astonishing Brain Injury
- Lessons of the brain: The Phineas Gage story - Harvard Gazette
Fylom generates episodes like this on any topic you're curious about.
Fylom episodes are researched, written, and voiced by AI. Automated checks help catch inaccuracies, but episodes aren't reviewed by a human and AI can still get things wrong. Treat them as a starting point, not a source of record — more in our accuracy disclaimer.