Each bit is just like the other bits-like a blancmange. To explain this dessert-based metaphor, the “blancmange” theory (not an official name) held that our brains are an undifferentiated mass. Gage’s accident occurred during a monumental shift in how people thought about the brain, when a debate was raging between those scientists who believed that the brain was like a trifle and others who thought it was more like a blancmange.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this accident is not that Gage survived, but that this railway foreman became an essential part of the emerging debate on the structure of the human brain. And even after that incident, he still remained very much awake and alive. Gage “got up and vomited the effort of vomiting pressed out about half a teacupful of the brain which fell upon the floor.” That’s quite an evocative picture, even if “half a teacupful” isn’t the most rigorous unit of measurement. At first, the doctor didn’t believe the story, thinking instead that Gage had been hit in the face with a flying lump of rock. Gage persisted in saying that the bar went through his head,” wrote Williams.
Gage’s colleagues-sitting up and chat- ting with his workmates, regaling them with the details of the accident. You’d expect someone with a head wound of that magnitude, at best, to be sitting very quietly feeling sorry for himself but Phineas Gage was-according to Dr. Williams, later wrote that the damage was so bad that he could see the gaping hole in Gage’s head even before he stepped out of his carriage, “the pulsations of the brain being very distinct,” he wrote. No one quite knows what went wrong that day, but as Gage drove his tamping iron into the hole it seems to have caused a spark that detonated the blasting powder and shot the metal rod straight through his head and a further twenty-five meters before it finally landed. Finally, sand was poured on top of the explosives so that everything could be “tamped down”-compacted with a meter-long, six-kilogram rod of iron. The process was a dicey one: first the hole was drilled, then it was filled with explosives and a fuse. Gage’s team were busy drilling holes in the rock face so they could blast a path for the railway.
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