Page 34 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

MONOCLE QUARTERLY JOURNAL | DEEP LEARNING
2.1 THE MIND AND THE BODY
By all accounts, Phineas Gage was a friendly, profes- sional and level-headed person before his accident. But on the afternoon of 13 September 1848, everything changed. At the age of 25, Phineas was a construction foreman heading up a small team of railway workers, primarily involved in blasting and clearing ground for tracks to be laid. This job was achieved by drilling a thin, vertical hole into the rock that was to be blasted and sprinkling a sufficient amount of gunpowder into the hole. A fuse was then added and the top of the hole was tightly packed with sand or clay – a practice called tamping – to direct the blast into the surrounding rock and to contain the explosion safely below ground.
As foreman, Phineas was tasked with first loading and gently packing the gunpower into the hole with an iron tamping rod. His assistant would then pour sand or clay on top of the powder and Phineas would more
vigorously tamp the sand into the hole to ensure a tight fit. Much like a writer may perhaps have a favourite pen, Phineas used a personalised tamping rod with a tapered tip for ease of holding, a piece he had commissioned from a local blacksmith. On that Wednesday, Phineas used his personalised rod to perform a task that he had completed thousands of times before, almost unconsciously.
Late that afternoon, after a long day of hard work, something went wrong. Witnesses claimed that Phineas was distracted by a commotion as some members of the team were noisily packing blasted debris into the back of a truck for removal. Phineas turned his head to see what the fuss was about, and upon returning to his tamping, failed to notice that his assistant had not yet poured sand into the blast hole. Striking down into the gunpowder- filled cavity with more force than normal, Phineas’ personalised rod set off a spark against the drilled rock.
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