Gory Tales from Vermont
Imagine you are packing gunpowder into a huge rock with a hammer. Imagine that, suddenly, something goes awry and the tamping iron you're using ignites the powder, hits your face and goes through your brain, landing behind you. Imagine to be conscious while all this happens....
This dreadful accident took place in Vermont on September 13, 1848 and Phineas Gage was the name of the protagonist of this tale. A tale who became a legend and a milestone in the history of neuroscience.
Surprisingly, Gage perfectly recovered from the accident from a physical point of view. However, the huge damage to his frontal lobe caused an enormous change in Gage's behaviour: in a nutshell, he became rude, violent, unable to organize his life and work. A violent child.
When I was told this story, I said to myself that this change was likely to be a consequence of the shock the whole accident certainly generated in Gage.
Although this interpretation could be correct, the shock wasn't the only cause, as many other studies proved.
The frontal association cortex has been studied on human beings quite a lot and certainly more than any other association area. In fact, psycosurgery was, sadly, a common practice until the 1960s: it was the easiest way to treat many mental disorders (have you seen "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"?).
Studies on monkeys have proved the importance of this association area for planning actions. A part of this area, the prefrontal cortex, shows great electric activity every time the aforementioned action is some sort of movement. This is possible due to the connection between prefrontal and premotor cortices.
Interestingly, here is where the difference between human being and monkey is remarkable: our frontal association cortex is (predictably) more developed in the former. In fact, the greater ability to interpret situations and plan a particular behaviour is one of our distinguishing features.
Not only does this cortex interpret a large spectrum of inputs, but it also works out a response, which we generally call 'behaviour' (a series of responses which differ according to the context).
