Professor Lappin

Psychology 115A Section 13

September 25, 2000

Localized Brain Damage and Its Effects on Human Interactions

How does the human brain work? It is one of the greatest paradoxes of humankind that human brains have been unable to fully understand how a human brain works. We know that the brain controls all of our mental, emotional, and physical functions. We can say with some certainty that different body operations such as thought, speech, and movement are controlled by different sectors of the brain. We agree that all of the sections of the brain must be connected in order to perform complex tasks like holding a conversation or operating an automobile. However, it is inexplicable how humans can lose a specific mental or emotional function while retaining all other mental and physical abilities. A more perplexing question: Why do the loss of certain mental or emotional functions severely impair a human when all his other capacities remain normal?

Pitching a baseball is a complex undertaking requiring precise command of many mental and physical functions. A pitcher, while in the bullpen before a game, for example, must first correctly see and interpret the signal given to him by the catcher. Next, he must employ previous stored memories by going through a set of physical motions (the windup) which he has refined through countless hours of practice. Consistency is critical to a pitcher’s success. In other words, he must make his muscles go through the same process every time he throws the ball. In doing so, he calls on the part of his brain responsible for memory to relay the proper commands to his motor cortex, which will activate and move his muscles to the proper positions in the proper sequence at the proper time. If the pitcher feels that he is completing the proper motions, and the ball is still not arriving at the target with the desired velocity, he must think about how best to adjust his delivery to correct the problem. Communication with the catcher is also vital to ensuring that both players have the same plan of action in mind. It is easy to see that one small deficiency in a pitcher’s mental or physical capacities would have a disastrous effect on the final outcome of his pitches, due to the chain reaction of breakdowns and failures which would inevitably result from, say, a physical injury or a lapse of concentration.

Phineas Gage was a construction foreman in Vermont in 1848.¹ His company was clearing a path for a massive railroad expansion. Phineas’ job was to tamp sand down into a hole which was filled with explosive powder to compact it. Then, a charge would be detonated remotely, and the rock would explode, leaving flat ground on top of which the tracks could be laid. One day, Phineas became distracted momentarily, and tamped the powder before it had been covered with sand. He caused a massive explosion that drove his tamping instrument, a long iron bar, through his skull. Remarkably, Gage lived, but he would never return to his previous form.

Would the post-injury Phineas Gage have made a good pitcher? It is difficult to say for certain, since it is not known whether he played baseball before his injury or not. However, let us assume that he did pitch for an amateur baseball team, and was rather proficient. How would his accident have affected his performance? Physically, except for the lack of vision in his left eye, he was remarkably unharmed by the accident. He retained all mental and physical capacities, so theoretically he still would have been able to throw a ball and hit a target, after adjusting for his vision loss. Gage may have been able to throw with some degree of success in a controlled practice environment. But it is unlikely that he would ever have been able to perform in a game situation, because games require a person to exhibit fine control over his emotions, something Gage did not possess. I can understand how much difficulty Gage would have had pitching after his accident because I know how difficult it is for a person, even one with normal mental capacities, to control his emotions over the course of an entire game. During my career, if I allowed myself to be affected by the words of the crowd or my opponents, I would become almost overcome with emotion, and that would affect the way I played physically because I would try to strike out every batter I faced by throwing the ball as hard as I could. The result was that I lost my command of my pitches and began to walk batters. Similarly, if I made a bad pitch that got hit hard, I would become so enraged with myself that I would allow it to affect the way I threw to the next batter. As I matured as a player, however, I learned to control and channel my negative energy and use it to my advantage in a positive way. Gage, lacking all control of his emotions, would have exploded into a profane fit of rage the first time he faced adversity. He also lost his decision-making ability, so he would never have been able to figure out which base to throw the ball to, had it ever been hit to him. In short, Gage would have possessed every physical tool necessary to play the game correctly, but he would have lacked the ability to use his tools in a responsible, intelligent manner. Other individuals with similar brain injuries would have faced similar difficulties. People like patient A and the Hebb-Penfield and Ackerly-Benton patients, although physically and intellectually capable, lost their planning and decision-making abilities and creativity, all essential to throwing a successful game of baseball.

Baseball has been used here as a metaphor for any type of complex task requiring the use of all aspects of brain activity. A baseball game can be thought of as a representation of the type of situations one may face during a typical day of his life. The tragedy of the kind of specialized brain injury seen in patients like Phineas Gage is that although they can still walk, speak, and think normally, they have lost a vital part of their personality. This loss of emotion prevents them from ever again interacting normally in social situations. They cannot hold jobs or make new friends. Finding a way to repair or treat localized brain injuries is one of the greatest challenges faced by twenty-first century medicine.