On September thirteenth, eighteen forty-eight, a premature explosion drove a three-and-a-half-foot iron rod completely through the skull of railway foreman Phineas Gage — entering below his left cheekbone and exiting through the top of his head. He remained conscious. He survived. He returned to work. But Phineas Gage, according to everyone who knew him, was no longer Phineas Gage. His personality had changed so completely that his own employer declined to rehire him.

In this episode of 5 Minute Strange, we cover the accident that changed neuroscience — what the tamping iron destroyed, why the damage to Gage's frontal lobes produced such specific changes in his personality while leaving other capacities intact, and how his case provided the first real evidence that different regions of the brain are responsible for different aspects of who we are. His skull and the tamping iron that passed through it are still on display at Harvard Medical School.

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