Phineas Gage

Phineas Gage was a rail construction worker and had an accident in which an axplosion dropped an iron bar through his head iN 1848 (Glenn and Raine, 2014, p. 87-90). Gage suffered from exhaustive damage to his prefrontal cortex and afterward his personality changed, despite preserved intelligence, movement, speech, memory, and learning. The exact location was to be found in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is known to be associated with decision making, associative learning, and the proccessing of feedback on reward and punishment. Patients with such lesions often exhibit psychopatic traits, and so the term "aquired sociopathy" was invented. Gage became irrevent and capriciously.