On Phineas Gage — indeed, he made headlines for his seemingly "normal functioning", but the devastating impact on his emotional capacities was skipped over in the popular press! So let's hear what happened after he "fully recovered", quoting from the 1994 study on this topic by the maverick neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio[1]:
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Gage was fully recovered. He remained as able-bodied and appeared to be as intelligent as before the accident; he had no impairment of movement or speech; new learning was intact, and neither memory nor intelligence in the conventional sense had been affected.
On the other hand, he had become irreverent and capricious. His respect for the social conventions by which he once abided had vanished. His abundant profanity offended those around him. Perhaps most troubling, he had taken leave of his sense of responsibility. He could not be trusted to honor his commitments. His employers had deemed him "the most efficient and capable" man in their "employ" but now had to dismiss him. In the words of his physician, "the equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculty and animal propensities" had been destroyed.
In the words of his friends and acquaintances, "Gage was no longer Gage". Gage began a new life of wandering that ended a dozen years later, in San Francisco, under the custody of his family. Gage never returned to a fully independent existence, never again held a job comparable to the one he once had. His accident had made headlines but his death went unnoticed.
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[1] http://jneunuebel.psych.udel.edu/Webpage/Courses/assets/Pape...