The trajectory of the iron bar through Phineas Gage’s head The most famous case study of a patient with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex is that of Phineas Gage. A 3 cm thick, 109 cm long tamping iron entered Gage’s head under his left cheek bone, shattering the upper jaw, passing through the back of the left eye and out the top of his head. This accident, which left a hole in the top of Gage’s skull about 9 cm long and 5 cm wide, caused devastating injury to his left and right prefrontal cortices. In 1994, Damasio and Damasio combined photographs and x-rays of Gage’s skull with computer modelling to produce a reconstruction of Gage’s brain and skull; onto this they projected the trajectory of the tamping iron. Source: Damasio, H., Grabowski, T., Frank, R., Galaburda, A.M. and Damasio, A.R., The return of Phineas Gage: Clues about the brain from a famous patient. Science, 1994, 246: 1102–1105. Department of Neurology and Image Analysis Facility, University of Iowa.