He pursued his hunch, and after parsing and reparsing the vague chronology in Harlow’s case report, Macmillan now believes that Gage’s behavioral troubles were temporary and that Gage eventually recovered some of his lost mental functions. Independent evidence also supports this idea. In 2010 a computer scientist and intellectual property consultant who sometimes collaborates with Macmillan, Matthew Lena, turned up a statement from a 19th-century doctor who lived in “Chili” and knew Gage well: “He was in the enjoyment of good health,” the doctor reported, “with no impairment whatever of his mental faculties.” To be sure, Macmillan does not believe that Gage magically recovered everything and “became Gage” again. But maybe Gage resumed something like a normal life.
Modern neuroscientific knowledge makes the idea of Gage’s recovery all the more plausible. Neuroscientists once believed that brain lesions caused permanent deficits: once lost, a faculty never returned. More and more, though, they recognize that the adult brain can relearn lost skills. This ability to change, called brain plasticity, remains somewhat mysterious, and it happens achingly slowly. But the bottom line is that the brain can recover lost functions in certain circumstances.
In particular Macmillan suggests that Gage’s highly regimented life in Chile aided his recovery. People with frontal-lobe damage often have trouble completing tasks, especially open-ended tasks, because they get distracted easily and have trouble planning. But in Chile Gage never had to plan his day: prepping the coach involved the same steps every morning, and once he hit the road, he simply had to keep driving forward until it was time to turn around. This routine would have introduced structure into his life and kept him focused.
A similar regime could, in theory, help other victims of Gage-like brain damage. One gruesome paper from 1999 (“Transcranial Brain Injuries Caused by Metal Rods or Pipes over the Past 150 Years”) chronicles a dozen such cases, including a drunken game of “William Tell.” Another case occurred on a construction site in Brazil in 2012, when a metal bar fell five stories, pierced the back of a man’s hardhat, and exited between his eyes. More commonly, people suffer brain damage on the battlefield or in car accidents. And according to a traditional reading of Gage, their prognosis was bleak. But according to Macmillan’s reading, maybe not. Because if even Phineas Gage bounced back—that’s a powerful message of hope.
5. Proud, Well Dressed, Disarmingly Handsome
Phineas Gage has probably never been more popular. Several musicians have written tributes. Someone started a blog called The Phineas Gage Fan Club, and another fan crocheted Mr. Gage’s skull. YouTube contains thousands of Gage videos, including several reenactments of the accident. (One involves Barbie dolls, another Legos. Beneath one, somebody commented, inevitably, “mind=blown.”) What’s more, his skull has become the modern equivalent of a medieval saint’s relic: the logbook at the Harvard museum has recorded pilgrims from Syria, India, Brazil, Korea, Chile, Turkey, and Australia within the past year. Comments in the book include, “An odd treat,” and “Phineas Gage was on my bucket list.”
More importantly, new material about Gage continues to emerge. In 2008 the first known image of Gage turned up, a sepia daguerreotype of him holding his tamping iron. (A second photo has since appeared.) The picture’s owners, the collectors Jack and Beverly Wilgus, originally labeled it “the whaler,” speculating that, somewhat like Ahab, the young man in it had lost his left eye to “an angry whale.” But after they posted the picture on Flickr, whaling enthusiasts protested that the smooth tamping iron looked nothing like a harpoon. One commenter finally suggested it might be Gage. To check this possibility, the Wilguses compared their image to a life mask of Gage made in 1849 and found that the features lined up perfectly, including a scar on Gage’s forehead. Although just one picture, it exploded the common image of Gage as a dirty, disheveled misfit. This Phineas was proud, well dressed, and disarmingly handsome.
Scientifically, Gage’s legacy remains more ambiguous. His story certainly captures people’s imaginations and kindles their interest in neuroscience. (Whenever I’m in mixed company and mention that I’ve written a book about the most fascinating injuries in neuroscience history, someone always blurts out, “Oh, like Phineas Gage!”) But his story also misleads people, at least in its traditional form. Based on interviews and citations, Macmillan’s revised history does seem to be gaining traction. But it’s an uphill climb. “It has occurred to me [to ask] from time to time,” Macmillan sighs, “what the hell I am doing working on this?”
As for the latest research on Gage—especially the brain connectivity and brain plasticity work—it seems sound. But that’s really for posterity to judge. Perhaps each new theory about Gage is indeed inching us closer to the truth. On the other hand, perhaps Gage is doomed to remain a historical Rorschach blot, revealing little but the passions and obsessions of each passing era.
Because of all the uncertainty, Ratiu, the Bucharest doctor, recommends that neuroscientists stop teaching Gage. “Leave this damn guy alone,” he says. (Like Gage himself, people seem to indulge in “gross profanity” when discussing his case.) But this seems unlikely. Whenever teachers need an anecdote about the frontal lobes, “you just take this ace out of your sleeve,” Ratiu says. “It’s just like whenever you talk about the French Revolution you talk about the guillotine, because it’s so cool.”
If nothing else, Macmillan says, “Phineas’s story is worth remembering because it illustrates how easily a small stock of facts can be transformed into popular and scientific myth.” Indeed, the myth-making continues today. “Several people have approached me with a view to develop film scripts or plays,” he says. One involved Gage falling in love with a Chilean prostitute who rescues him from a life of dissolution. Another involved Gage returning to the United States, befriending and freeing a slave, then banding together with Abraham Lincoln to win the Civil War.
Another, deeper reason Gage will probably always be with us is that despite all that remains murky and obscure, his life did hint at something important: the brain and mind are one. As one neuroscientist writes, “Beneath the tall tales and fish stories, a basic truth embedded in Gage’s story has played a tremendous role in shaping modern neuroscience: that the brain is the physical manifestation of the personality and sense of self.” That’s a profound idea, and it was Phineas Gage who pointed us toward that truth.
JOURDAN IMANI KEITH
At Risk
FROM Orion
THE TORRENTIAL RAIN in the first week of September pummels the youth crew’s tents at night, depositing mud and sediment in the creek where they pump water for drinking. For 17 days the teenagers I recruited to build trails for the North Cascades National Park are camping during one of the heaviest storms in 100 years. The river coughs thick brown mudslides onto State Route 20, blocking road access from the west. Instead of a three-and-a-half-hour drive to pick them up, I begin a seven-hour journey eastward from Seattle through rock formations that dart out like deer from the light-green sagebrush.
Arriving in the dark, I find the Pearrygin Lake campground outside of the Old West town of Winthrop barely occupied. The warm air is without insects, so I tuck myself in on the grass behind the white 12-passenger van I have rented to pick up the crew. Lying out under the stars without the nylon canopy of my tent, I nestle into the reflection of the half-moon and backlit mountains in the lake.
Despite my comfort, I am acutely aware that I am at risk: Black. Woman. Alone. Camping. Even in the disguising cloak of moonlight shadows, I need protection. I sleep with the van keys in my pocket and practice grabbing them to push the panic button in case of danger.
The spring chinook populations in the watersheds around Route 20 are labeled “at-risk populations” when the Forest Service discusses road analysis in the Methow River subbasin and its watersheds. They are protected under the Endangered Species Act. Protecting an endangered species means changing the practices in an entire ecosystem to safeguard their survival. It means managing
the loss of their habitat, the turbidity of their waters, the surface water runoff from the streets that threatens them, and the effluents from the wastewater that disrupt their endocrine systems and, if unchecked, will cause their extinction.
Every year salmon return to the rivers where they were born. And every year I return to the birthplace of the wilderness program I developed to nurture the next generation of outdoor leaders in the cathedral peaks and azure lakes of the North Cascades. This year the wettest August followed by the heavy rains of September threatened both my crew of nascent campers and the eggs of the spawning salmon.
My youth crews are Black. Latino. Urban. This is what the woman at a party hears when I describe them. “Oh, you work with at-risk youth,” she says. She doesn’t hear Volunteer. College Student. Intern. Outdoor Leader. The “at-risk” label is different for youth than it is for salmon. “At-risk” isn’t a protection but a limitation, a judgment, an assumption. Even when the threats to their survival are the same as to an endangered species—an unstable habitat, lack of nutrition, and a damaged social and natural ecosystem—the label leaves them at a deficit, offers no promise for protection.
In the case of the salmon, being protected as an endangered species alerts us to the fullness of their connection to a magnificent web. Their relationship to threatened indigenous cultures and to other endangered species like the majestic orca whales is valued. Their label protects them.
I tell the woman at the party, “All youth are at risk—the risks are just different.” And some are endangered.
JOURDAN IMANI KEITH
Desegregating Wilderness
FROM Orion
I SAW SEVERAL bison the other morning as I followed the usual left and right turns that take me to the rural outskirts of Enumclaw, a town 45 minutes from my house in Seattle. The bison were actually boulders or bushes or clumps of hay that had wandered away from the stack. But I saw them as clearly as I did on mornings when I walked to my job along the lake in Yellowstone, following the gravel paths that passed dangerously close to the resting mammoths. Always, now, since leaving Yellowstone, I see shadows of wilderness wherever I go.
It is the same for my friend on the other side of the continent who, decades later, still sees the Beartooth Mountains in the jagged clouds above Philadelphia’s streets. It is also true for some of the teenagers, like Michael, who I camped and worked with in the mountains and lakes of the North Cascades National Park. One early autumn I ran into Michael in our neighborhood on a south Seattle corner, which was plump with fast-food chains and drugstores. He pointed into the greasy air above a discount food outlet. “There,” he said, gesturing more emphatically, “see it? It’s an eagle’s nest.” I strained, wanting to see the shadow of the wilderness cast so close to the intersection of honking cars, but I couldn’t see what he saw. Four years later he still talks about it, still insists that it was there, and now he mourns, “They have torn up the path and removed the pole where it nested.”
In 1964 the Civil Rights Act and the Wilderness Act both became laws that govern the land and the people of the U.S. The Civil Rights Act required the desegregation of our public accommodations, including the “separate but equal” facilities, camping areas, and outdoor eating areas assigned to “colored” people in our national parks. The Wilderness Act protected large areas that would have been lost without laws in place to stop people from dominating every landscape. Fifty years later the cool shadow cast by these two monolithic acts makes it possible for me to occasionally enjoy outdoor experiences in remote places that would be out of reach without the combination of their protections.
Yet access is more than the permission to be somewhere formerly off limits. The people accessing recreation in the wilderness are still predominantly white, and de facto segregation exists instead of a legal one. The protections of the two acts fall short of addressing the underlying land-use practices and attitudes that have resulted in a segregated wilderness, one in which the wild is hardest to reach for the people who, for historical reasons, still have fewer of the financial assets required to get there.
While the lack of access to wild places is beginning to be recognized as an issue of inequity, the absence of more than just a shadow of wilderness in and around urban places is not.
When President Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, it legalized the segregation of wild places from the places where people remain. In doing so, it entrenched the cultural belief shared by Aldo Leopold and others that wilderness must be “segregated and preserved” from the areas where people live, including areas where indigenous people lived for thousands of years. Consequently the protection of remote wilderness areas has meant the sacrifice and disappearance of nearby wild places, which, because of their smaller size and proximity to people, are not defined or protected as wilderness.
Segregating wilderness from people creates permission to deforest and devalue the landscape where people are allowed to “remain” while falsely defining the remote landscape as “pristine.” Desegregating the wilderness requires not only the laws that forbid discrimination but also the reintegration of nearby wilderness where people live.
Now largely white organizations and agencies are grappling with the dilemma of a segregated wilderness by working feverishly to get urban people out to remote places—because people will not protect what they have not enjoyed. But what if wilderness zigzagged through areas where urban people live? Then accessing the wilderness in our daily lives could be more tangible than wild shadows cast by memory.
At the signing of the Civil Rights Act, President Johnson said, “Freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning.” I think the same is true for wilderness.
ELI KINTISCH
Into the Maelstrom
FROM Science
WHEN 40 CLIMATE experts huddled in a small conference room near Washington, D.C., last September, all eyes were on an atmospheric scientist named Jennifer Francis. Three years ago Francis proposed that the warming Arctic is changing weather patterns in temperate latitudes by altering the behavior of the northern polar jet stream, the high, fast-moving river of air that snakes around the top of the world. The idea neatly linked climate change to weather, and it has resonated with the press, the public, and powerful policymakers. But that day Francis knew that many of her colleagues, including some in that room, were deeply skeptical of the idea and irritated by its high profile.
Sometimes Francis is anxious before high-pressure talks and wakes before dawn. Not this time, even though the National Academy of Sciences had assembled the group essentially to scrutinize her hypothesis. “I wasn’t nervous,” she recently recalled. “I was prepared for the pushback.”
It came fast and hard. Just one slide into her talk, before she could show a single data point, a colleague named Martin Hoerling raised a challenge. “I’ll answer that with my next figure,” Francis calmly responded, her bright blue eyes wide open. Two minutes later Hoerling interrupted again, calling a figure “arbitrary.” Francis, unruffled, parried—only to have Hoerling jab again.
Francis presented the evidence for her hypothesis as an orderly chain of events. “I challenged every link in the chain,” recalls Hoerling, an atmospheric dynamicist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. Eventually the workshop’s organizer had to intervene. No more questions “so the dissertation defense can go on,” nervously joked David Robinson, a climatologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where Francis also works.
Later some attendees praised Francis’s performance. “The way [Hoerling] aggressively interrupted was unusual,” says Arctic scientist Walt Meier of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “But she handled it very well, with grace.”
Hoerling’s assessment? “She was unpersuasive,” he says. “The hypothesis is pretty much dead in the water.”
A Stiff Headwind
Francis’s hypothesis has divided colleagues ever since she first proposed it in 2011, and the divisions have only deepened as Francis became a go-to climate scientist for reporters, a marquee speaker at major conferences, and an informal consultant to John Holdren, President Barack Obama’s science adviser. “It’s become a shooting match over her work,” says atmospheric dynamicist Walter Robinson of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “Which side are you on?”
More than scientific bragging rights are at stake. If a warming Arctic is already affecting weather in the midlatitudes, then climate change “no longer becomes something that’s remote, affecting polar bears,” Meier says. Instead it’s a day-to-day reality affecting billions of people—and a challenge to policymakers responsible for assessing and reducing the risks.
Yet to many Francis critics, the attention she has received is premature, a product of unusual weather in the United States and Francis’s cheerfully outgoing and insistent style. Hoerling, for one, says Francis is driving “a campaign . . . This single person has been able to promulgate a conjecture into an apparent explanation of everything.”
“I can’t help it if the media and public are interested in my research,” Francis responds. But she readily admits that all the evidence is not in and concedes that the public interest has inverted the normal life cycle of a scientific controversy. “Usually a hypothesis gets tested . . . the conclusions are solid and then it becomes news,” she says. But in this case, says Stephen Vavrus, a climate modeler at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who collaborates with Francis, “Jennifer and I have been forced into the uncomfortable position of defending—or at least explaining—our position before the scientific process has run its course.”
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015 Page 20
