An excellent post in The BPS Research Digest. It turns out that much of what I thought I knew about Phineas Gage was wrong.
‘So the textbooks mostly won’t tell you about Gage’s rehabilitation, or provide you with the latest evidence on his injuries. Instead, you might hear how hear never worked again and became a vagrant, or that he became a circus freak for the rest of his life, showing off the holes in his head. “The most egregious error,” says Griggs, “seems to be that Gage survived for 20 years with the tamping iron embedded in his head!”.’
I agree with the authors here that getting your facts right is important, indeed, I think it is a basic responsibility of scholars.
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