Top Brain, Bottom Brain by Stephen Kosslyn

Author:Stephen Kosslyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

An Aspect of Personality

If you want to understand yourself, you must consider differences in personality, an aspect of which is your typical cognitive mode. What do we mean by “personality”? Consider how several friends would respond to your suggestion that you go bungee jumping. The different ways they respond reflect their personalities: One may be very adventurous and open, starting to plan the outing even before you finish asking; another may react with thinly disguised horror; another may be amused; and so forth. Personality arises from the combined influences of differences in temperament (such as how high-strung or passive a person is), traits (such as being honest or deceptive), and habits (such as being compulsively neat).

From history comes a real-life illustration of the relationship between cognitive modes and personality more generally. It’s the story of Phineas Gage, who suffered a freak injury that provided nineteenth-century scientists with important insights into cognitive function.

Raised on a farm in New Hampshire, Gage demonstrated unusual resourcefulness at a young age. He received little formal education, but sometime in his teens or early twenties he must have concluded that he could better himself by forsaking his family’s hardscrabble existence. Opportunity beckoned: This was the early Industrial Age, an era when railroads were booming, with new companies forming and new lines being built around the country. Gage learned the construction trade and aspired to management. The evidence suggests that he was a good planner who learned from his experiences and incorporated lessons learned in deciding every next step—a recipe for success. By 1848, he had advanced to foreman.

On September 13, 1848, Gage was in charge of a crew that was building a line for the recently chartered Rutland and Burlington Railroad that passed near Cavendish, Vermont. Late that afternoon, he was using a long, tapered metal tool called a tamping iron to pack explosives into a hole cut in rock. Momentarily distracted, he unintentionally let the iron hit the side of the hole. A spark ignited an explosion and the tamping iron shot upward from the hole like a massive bullet, passing through his cheek and head, destroying his left eye and taking out a significant part of the top and bottom front of the left side of his brain. Three feet seven inches long, and an inch and a quarter in diameter at its thickest point, the tapered iron landed more than sixty feet behind him.

Gage was knocked down and may have briefly lost consciousness, but, amazingly, within a few minutes he was speaking coherently and able to walk. He was taken by oxcart to a nearby hotel, where local doctor Edward H. Williams was called to treat him.

“Doctor, here is business enough for you,” Gage said when Williams arrived.

Not long after, Dr. John M. Harlow took charge of the case. Lying in a pool of blood on a bed, Gage pointed to the hole in his left cheek and told Harlow: “The iron entered there and passed through my head.” It was a disturbingly precise description.

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