I’ll see your Phineas Gage…

            If you’ve done any reading or listened to any talks about the “mind-brain” issue, and especially about the scientific rejection of the concept of a “soul”, there’s one name that you’ve probably heard mentioned in literally every book or talk about the topic.  It’s not the name of a scientist or philosopher or even a theologian.  I bet this never gave much thought to the mind-brain problem.  He certainly didn’t know any neuroscience.  Yet there he is, a central character in the whole discussion.

             His name?  Phineas Gage.  Mr. Gage was a railroad construction foreman who lived in the early- to mid-1800’s.  What makes him famous is a work accident that he experienced.  Specifically, he was tamping down some explosives with a rod and there was an explosion that drove the rod through his eye/cheek and exited the top of his skull, destroying a significant portion of his left frontal lobe.  Miraculously, he survived the accident and lived for more than 10 years after that accident and was able, after some time, to return to employment as a stagecoach driver.  Importantly, some of the physicians who treated him recorded the events in detail and he became rather well-known even during his lifetime.  Key to the “existence of the soul” issue, it was reported that his personality changed significantly after the accident.  This seems to be the first clear evidence that damage to the brain could cause changes to personality, thus localizing personality to the physical brain rather than in some external “soul.”[1]  There is a lot more to the story and a lot known about the whole situation, but I’ll let you read that elsewhere on the internet. 

              This one single event is often given as the definitive “nail in the coffin” for the concept of an immaterial soul or mind or any such thing.  Here’s an example of the finality with which Mr. Gage’s case is presented:

 

“Phineas Gage’s case shattered the myth of an immaterial soul, showing that personality, identity, and decision-making come from the brain. Neuroscience confirms this—damage the brain, and you change. Dualism fails to explain how a soul could control neurons...Unsettling or not, the evidence is clear: we are our brains—nothing more.”  [From an internet post by someone identified as Theitant]

 

              This is just one example and you’ll find this same sentiment expressed in many ways repeatedly throughout the literature.  I mean, it’s obvious isn’t it?  Phineas Gage experienced severe damage to the frontal lobe of his brain and his whole personality changed.  Presumably, if he had an immaterial soul, it would not have been damaged by the very physical spike that passed through his brain.  If personality was determined by the soul, then his personality should have been unaffected by damage to the brain.  Thus, the obvious conclusion is that our personality arises in our physical brain and has nothing to do with a soul.  And, further, if the soul doesn’t have anything to do with our personality, then why even hypothesize the existence of a soul?  Any intelligent person should realize that the brain is all there is – there is no soul and never was.  

              Not so fast.  I have two points I’d like to bring up about this “open and shut” case against the soul.

              First, there seems to be a very simple analogy that calls into question the jump to the conclusion that is made from the Gage case.  I will use the analogy of a radio, which, granted, was not invented for another 50 years after Gage’s accident.  A battery-powered radio is a very cool device, especially if you didn’t know how it works.  Let’s say you lived in Gage’s time and someone travelled back in time and gave you one of these magical devices.  It is a completely enclosed system.  You can hold it in your hands and you can easily see that nothing goes into, or out of, the radio.  But it produces sounds!  You can hear people talking through it and so on.  Where do those sounds come from?  Maybe you hypothesize that the radio has some kind of immaterial thing you call a “soul” that produces the sounds that you hear.  It’s nice to listen to music while you work so you decide to take it with you to your job on the railroad construction site.  While on the job, an unfortunate accident occurs in which an explosion causes a metal rod to be shot right through your radio.  Parts of the radio are missing, but somehow the radio is not totally destroyed.  It still makes sounds, but now the sounds are all staticky and you really can’t make out what people are saying.  The “personality” of your radio is totally different.

              Well, now your idea of a “soul” inside the radio is destroyed.  You know that the physical rod couldn’t have destroyed the radio’s immaterial soul, so the sounds coming from the radio must come from the physical components inside the box.  Obviously, the sounds must have been coming from little people and little bands playing inside the radio, and they got damaged by the spike.  It’s an open and shut case – there is no such thing as a “radio soul.”  Right?

              Of course that’s ridiculous.  The sound that a radio produces are generated at the radio station, which could be miles away, and they are transmitted through the air to the little radio you have next to you.  When the metal rod damages your radio, it doesn’t damage anyone or anything at the radio station.  The transmission is still occurring just fine.  But now the receipt of those signals is disrupted so that the sounds that your little radio produces are no longer decipherable.

              Isn’t that exactly analogous to the situation with Phineas Gage?  Obviously his soul was not damaged, but the instrument through which his soul acts – his brain – was damaged.  I fail to see how this is an open and shut case against the soul at all.  Yes, it does give us insight into how the soul might interact with the brain, in the same way that damage to the radio helps us to have some insight into what kind of transmissions the radio receives.  But there is no way that what happened to Phineas Gage “shatters the myth of an immaterial soul.”  I guess, to me, this analogy seems so obvious that I just don’t understand why the whole case is so famous.

              I’d like to dive into the radio analogy more deeply sometime in the future <here>, but for now I want to go to the second major issue I have with the conclusions drawn from Mr. Gage’s accident and change in personality.

              To explain my second major issue, I’m going to use another analogy.  Ultimately, in the end, I think that the Phineas Gage event actually helps to illustrate a very strong argument for the soul!  Let’s see if you agree.

              I’m going to use the analogy/example of human motor learning, which certainly does happen in the physical brain (and, in my opinion, not in the soul).  Think about learning to throw a baseball.  Just about anyone can learn to throw a baseball.  But how many people can throw 90 mph fastballs for strikes?  Well, there are a few, obviously, and most are highly paid pitchers in the Major Leagues.  But how did they learn to pitch so well?  Certainly, there are various paths that each pitcher has taken to get to where they are, but there is one universal that is never violated:  they all had to practice.  For years they had to practice.  By the time they get to the big leagues, they’ve probably thrown literally millions of pitches throughout their life.  Millions.  There is just no way around the slow process of motor learning via practice.

              What would you say if someone one day picked up a baseball for the first time and started throwing 90 mph pitches for strikes?  I’ll even grant you someone who has been very athletic throughout their life and runs marathons and lifts weights and so on.  That still doesn’t allow for someone to just pick up a baseball and instantly become a big league starter.  That could never happen.  And it doesn’t happen for a simple reason:  such learning requires neurons to learn the proper sequence of firing and for those patterns to get ingrained in the neural networks of the brain and spinal cord.  That is a slow process.  There’s no way to substantially speed that process up.  It takes the time it takes.

              Tragically, though, you could go the other way in an instant.  A major league pitcher could have a stroke or some other kind of trauma and the motor area of their brain could be damaged and they could instantly and permanently lose the ability to throw pitches.  In fact, they could end up with a paralyzed arm that couldn’t even hold a baseball, let alone throw it.  Although this would be tragic, we would not consider it anything out of the ordinary.  That’s how brain damage works.  It’s instant.  But there’s no reversing of brain damage instantly. 

              My point in this analogy/example is that instant changes in the brain occur in only one direction:  they always involve a destructive outcome.  Learned traits are lost.  Personality is changed for the worse.  Memories are lost.  Knowledge is lost.  In order to get constructive outcomes, the process of training the brain is painfully slow.  No one gets hit in the head and suddenly becomes a major league pitcher or a concert pianist or an Albert Einstein.  Negative physical changes in the brain can be instant.  Positive physical changes in the brain are not instant – they take days to weeks to years to happen.  That’s just the way the brain works. 

              With that backdrop in mind, let’s consider for a moment a few people who ought to be much more famous with respect to the mind/brain problem than Phineas Gage.  I’m talking about people who have transformed themselves instantly without brain damage.  If Phineas Gage is evidence that the brain controls our whole personality, and that blowing out a tenth of it causes an obvious change in the personality of an individual…well, then I present to you…

 

Saul of Tarsus,

              or

Augustine of Hippo,

              or

Clive Staples Lewis,

              or…

any of the many many other people who have had a radical, essentially instantaneous personality transformation without having a tenth of their brain damaged!

 

              In fact, their transformations – at least some of them – are more profound, more pronounced, and much better documented – than good old Mr. Gage. 

              Let’s just stick with the story of Saul of Tarsus for the moment – a story I have addressed previously <here>.  Saul was a learned, well-trained Jewish religious leader in the first century AD.  He had made it his goal in life to hunt down Christians and, if possible, get them sentenced to death.  But one day, on his way to hunt down more Christians in Damascus, he had a transforming episode that changed his entire view of life, faith, and life purpose.  The episode lasted less than a few minutes and yet the transformation was drastic and permanent.  He went on to become the leading proponent of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and wrote major sections of the Christian Bible.

              You may not agree with Saul/Paul’s life purpose, but you have to admit that this transformation was constructive (not destructive), instantaneous (relative to physiological brain changes), and permanent.  Compare that to what happened to Phineas Gage.  The personality changes to Mr. Gage required the total destruction of approximately a tenth of Mr. Gage’s brain.  Where was the explosion in Saul’s brain?  There was none.  After his transformation, he wrote literary works that stand with the best of all time.  If personality is totally determined by the physical brain, then what possible sudden rearrangement of neuronal connections could possibly have happened to cause such change in an individual’s personality?  A conservative estimate is that Mr. Gage completely lost at least 10 million neurons.  How many neurons had to suddenly change their firing patterns in Saul’s brain in order to achieve what was an even greater transformation in personality?

              I suspect that the only argument is to try to downplay the degree of transformation for these individuals.  Spare me.  The documentation regarding Mr. Gage is pretty good, but there is considerable disagreement about the extent of his change in personality.  On the other hand, I have books and books and books describing the transformation of the individuals I mentioned above.  And I could pull out an endless series of other people whose lives have been transformed in an instant.  Many of them are living right now – they could be your neighbors.  The evidence of their transformed lives is often etched in their bodies…tattoos on their skin, scars on their arms, etc. – all clear evidence that they once lived a very different life than they do now!  How does such instantaneous transformation happen in a physical brain?

              My hypothesis would be that the instantaneous transformation happened in the soul, which then became apparent as it worked through the brain.  If you could measure someone’s brain activity during one of these transformations, I don’t think you would find 10 million neurons suddenly changing their firing patterns.  That seems physically impossible, based on what we know of how brains work, how neurons learn.  Yes, the transformation becomes apparent through the actions that happen via the physical brain, but the initial instantaneous transformation occurs in the soul, not the brain.  If you have already rejected the idea of a soul long ago, you won’t agree with me; but at least you have to recognize that the rejection of the soul is premature until there is at least some reasonable hypothesis as to how a positive transformation, on the scale we observe in these cases, can happen in the physical brain alone.

              Maybe you will argue that personality can be transformed significantly by small, progressive changes in just a few neurons of the brain.  You might hypothesize that the neural networks in these individuals were at a tipping point, where a change in one neuron has a broad effect over a whole network of neurons.  Kind of like when the mechanical odometer in old cars would go from 99,999.9 back to all zeroes.  I don’t think I can disprove the “tipping point-waterfall cascade-odometer” hypothesis, but that seems extremely far-fetched and doesn’t fit the evidence we find in these transformed lives.  But, I guess you’ll have to stand confidently on that idea, as weak as it seems, because you surely wouldn’t want to admit that Mr. Gage isn’t the open and shut case against the soul that it is claimed it to be.

              So…I’ll see your Phineas Gage…and raise you Saul of Tarsus!

 

 

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[1] I find it hard to believe that this was the first evidence of the importance of the physical brain in shaping a person’s personality, but it is such a spectacular and shocking story that I think we can at least say that it was the first famous and broadly recognized evidence that the physical brain shapes personality.