Brain Trauma - Highlights from Brain Works 2013

Excerpt from Brain Works 2013, a free community event from Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Register for our next brain innovation event at: http://bjhne.ws/xm In this portion of the Brain Works presentation, neurosurgeons Dr. Eric Leuthardt and Dr. Albert Kim talk about brain trauma. While it's amazing to talk about when things are going right and what the brain does in those situations, it's equally useful and informative to think about when things go wrong with the brain. Many things can impact the brain and take out (or affect) a certain function. One of these things is brain trauma. Trauma, or what we sometimes call traumatic brain injury, is a really important world problem. And it ranges from things like falling off a chair to motor vehicle collisions to military blast injuries. These things can really injure your brain in an acute way. Some of these traumas have become quite famous. For example, there is the story of Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was a very responsible, religious railroad worker, and he had a serious accident when blasting rock one day. A tamping iron flew through his head and he somehow, miraculously survived this accident. From that point on, this guy who once was religious and responsible - the guy you want on the job - became this guy who cursed all the time, was never on time for work, and was just not reliable anymore. As someone put it, he just wasn't "Gage" anymore. People have been captivated by this injury and the story of Phineas Gage, even into the modern era. And, actually, his skull and his tamping iron can be seen in Cambridge Massachusetts. Many experiments were done to find out exactly what part of the brain this tamping iron went through. Gage's traumatic brain injury teaches us a very important lesson about what the frontal lobe does, because that's what the tamping iron went through. The frontal lobe is important for personality, judgment, and executive function -- or your ability to make high-level decisions. Everyone makes high-level decisions -- not just CEOs - and that's thanks to the frontal lobe.