Brain-Injury

In 1941, during a German air raid on Norway, a young woman named Astrid L. was struck in the head by bomb shrapnel. She survived. She recovered. But when she started speaking again, something was wrong. Her accent was different. Not slightly different—completely different. She was Norwegian. She’d lived her entire life in Norway, speaking Norwegian with a Norwegian accent. After the injury, she spoke Norwegian with what sounded like a strong German accent. ...

On September 13, 1848, a three-foot-seven-inch iron rod weighing thirteen pounds shot through Phineas Gage’s skull at the speed of a cannonball. It entered below his left cheekbone, passed behind his left eye, tore through the front part of his brain, and exploded out through the top of his head, landing about 80 feet away, covered in blood and brain matter. Gage was packing explosives into a rock using a tamping iron when a spark ignited the powder charge prematurely. The rod became a projectile, and Gage became the most famous patient in the history of neuroscience. ...

Dr. P. was a distinguished music teacher and singer who could tell you the exact interval between any two notes you played. He could identify a Brahms sonata from the first three measures. He could conduct a choir through complex harmonies without missing a beat. But he couldn’t recognize his wife’s face. Worse than that—when Dr. P. went to leave the neurologist’s office after his examination, he reached for his wife’s head and tried to lift it off her shoulders. ...

A neurologist is examining a patient who suffered frontal lobe damage from a stroke. The doctor sets a pair of glasses on the table between them during the examination. The patient reaches out, picks up the glasses, and puts them on—over the pair of glasses he’s already wearing. The doctor, curious, places another pair of glasses on the table. The patient picks them up and puts them on. Now he’s wearing three pairs of glasses, stacked on top of each other. ...