version of events is that it is totally un-Darwinian.
For Darwin, brain trauma doesn’t reveal our true animal nature, it separates us from our true animal nature. For Darwin, as we have seen, snarling is no more atavistic than smiling, aggression no more human than sociability. ‘We have every reason to believe,’ argues Karl Popper in the same vein, that our ancestors ‘were social prior to becoming human’.*
* Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations:The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 1962.
The Myth of the Supermax Brain
In the struggle for the survival of ideas, Robert Louis Stephenson’s fiction is selected over Darwinian fact. Jekyll and Hyde better fits the modern Myth of the Supermax Brain.
According to this myth, the prefrontal cortex operates like a supermax prison locking down the seething violent criminality of our true selves.
The Supermax Myth is popular because it ticks so very many boxes about how the mind ought to work. Here it seems is the bridge between Freudian psychology and modern neurobiology, between the psychoanalyst’s couch and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Such a strategically important bridge is always going to be defended with ferocity. Only fanatical loyalty to the Supermax Myth can, I think, explain V. S. Ramachandran’s curious hostility towards Phineas Gage. In Phantoms in the Brain, he tells us that after the accident Gage became ‘a worthless vagabond with absolutely no moral sense’.
The asperity is startling, not least because it flies in the face of the historical record. We know that the worthless vagabond continued to support his family, working on their smallholding in Enfield, New Hampshire. In the remaining thirteen years of his life, he took on a series of increasingly demeaning jobs, despite suffering seizures, blackouts and terrible headaches.
In what follows I am indebted to Malcolm Macmillan’s painstaking research into first-hand sources, archive material and contemporary witness statements as he single-handedly disinterred man from myth in his book An Odd Kind Of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage.
One hot and dusty day in August, 1849, Dr John Jackson travelled from Boston to Enfield, New Hampshire to interview the Gage family. He’d been hoping to examine Phineas himself, but met only his widowed mother and brother-in-law, who told him Phineas was in Montpelier trying to get work with another railroad company ‘doing what he did before’.
I confess that I had to re-read that last phrase three times over, when I first came across it in An Odd Kind Of Fame. Doing what he did before …? Astonishingly, Phineas Gage was trying to find work as a blasting foreman! I guess he was hoping to impress the Montpelier railway company with his experience more than his skill. Then again, who better than he to instruct railway navvies on how really, really careful you should be when priming an explosive with your tamping iron? It is after all a moot point whether we listen more attentively to the one-armed or two-armed bomb disposal expert.
Dr Jackson stayed to interview Phineas’s mother Phebe Gage, still in black crepe since the death of her husband a few months earlier, and made notes of their conversation. Jackson began by asking Phebe Gage about her son’s recuperation, and jotted down her reply:
abt. February he was able to do a little work abt. ye horses & barn, feedg. ye cattle &c.; that as ye time for ploughing came he was able to do half a days work after that and bore it well.*
* Malcolm Macmillan, An Odd Kind Of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage, 2000.
Dr Jackson then asked after her son’s mental state. She replied that for the first few days after the accident her son was ‘childish’, but now he was back to his old self – except his memory was impaired. ‘A stranger would notice nothing peculiar’, she told Dr Jackson, but she did and so did the rest of the family.
Clearly, Phineas Gage after the accident was not the same man as before. Brain damage changed who he was, but did it extinguish who he was? Did it reveal for our edification some ancestral primate? Not for Phineas’s family at least. They saw in him the same industrious young man he had always been, eager to get on, and so impatient to be well again that he even ploughed a field before he was fully recovered. He was also, it seems, anxious to retain the hard-won status of blasting foreman, even if it meant he had to travel the sixty-five miles from Enfield to Montpelier in hopes of finding a firm who would hire him despite his disfigurement and, uh, track record.
This, then, is the raving wild man of neuroscientific myth, the worthless vagabond with absolutely no moral sense. Ramachandran’s belief in a mythology unsupported by evolutionary biology commits him to a version of events unsupported by the historical record. If Phineas Gage isn’t a worthless vagabond, then we have to abandon the Supermax Myth, the bridge between psychology and neurobiology, and completely rethink our conception of the brain. At this point Ramachandran’s acolytes helpfully suggest: ‘An Open Prison, perhaps?’ At which point one can only smile politely, tip one’s hat and bid them each good day.
In her brilliant essay Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson singles out for attention the ‘oddly stereotyped way’ in which brain books handle the issue of Phineas Gage’s swearing as if this somehow showed that the beast within had escaped. This is especially odd, she says, as what could be more human than swearing? So far as we know we are the only animals that do it.
That said, it will be a sad day if we finally decipher low frequency whale music only to discover that humpback whales are hurling long drawn-out expletives across the ocean at each other:
‘Yyeeewwww waaaaaannnkkkaaaaahhhhh!’
‘Yeeeeewww ffffuuuucckkkkkiiiinnggg bbaaaaassssttttaaaaaaard!’
To complement her argument, I’d just like to add another reason why I think the neuroscientific literature’s fixation on Gage’s swearing is odd. Railway navvies were as famously foul-mouthed as mule skinners. If a man was swearing among a gang of navvies, who would notice?
In 1838, an engineer working on the London-Birmingham Railway, said that English navvies were:
Possessed of all the daring recklessness of the Smuggler, without any of his redeeming qualities, their ferocious behaviour can only be equaled by the brutality of their language.
In The Railway Navvies, Terry Coleman puzzles over why there are not more reprints of Amercian navvy worksongs, and concludes that the songs were so sweary and blasphemous that they were ‘considered unprintable and so were lost’.
And yet every telling of the Phineas Gage story says that his co-workers were shocked by his swearing, and always includes the following po-faced quote from a navvy: ‘Gage isn’t the same Gage anymore’. These Blushing Railroad Workers of Vermont come across like Monty Python’s lumberjacks, who skip and jump and like to press wild flowers.
There is in fact a very good reason why contemporary observers attached great significance to Gage’s swearing. But this dramatic significance is lost to us so long as we use anachronisms like orbitofrontal cortex, ventromedial frontal lobe, or pre-frontal cortex. What the iron bar destroyed was not the ventromedial frontal lobe, but the Organ of Veneration, for the 1850s were the heyday of phrenology.
The Organ of Veneration
If we keep in mind that Phineas Gage’s Organ of Veneration has been destroyed, then the focus on his gross profanity begins to make sense. It wasn’t the swearing that got everyone’s attention, it was the swearing in front of his betters. No-one cares what oaths low people hurl at each other, but when ushered into the presence of someone venerable like Henry Bigelow, Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, you keep a civil tongue in your head. To swear where you should venerate is a shocking abrogation of fundamental social norms, like a soldier patting his commanding officer on the bottom and saying, ‘What’s with all this ordering about, love? If you want to get on in this world,