One of the great (and, it must be said, most written about) events in early neuroscience occurred in 1848 in rural Vermont when a young railroad builder named Phineas Gage was packing dynamite into a rock and it exploded prematurely, shooting a two-foot tamping rod through his left cheek and out the top of his head before it clattered back to Earth about fifty feet away. The rod removed a perfect core of brain about an inch in diameter. Miraculously, Gage survived and appears not even to have lost consciousness, though he did lose his left eye and his personality was forever transformed.
