PS215 Unit 8 Brain and Self Seminar Reflection Example

Is My Father Still in There? A PS215 Unit 8 Seminar Reflection on the Brain and the Self

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS215: Neuroscience

Unit 8 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, her father and the classmates are composite; the historical case and studies cited are real.

The Question I Brought

I came to the Unit 8 seminar with a question I had not said aloud. After my father's stroke, some of what made him himself seemed gone: the quick jokes, the long stories about rehearsals, the way he talked over everyone at dinner. On bad days I wondered whether the man I knew was still in there. I hoped the seminar would tell me whether the self is something the brain can lose, and I was a little afraid of what the answer would be.

Gage and the Changed Self

The seminar began with Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman whose left frontal lobe was pierced by an iron tamping rod in 1848. He survived, but people who knew him said he was no longer the same man: once careful and dependable, he became impulsive and unreliable. Damasio et al. (1994) reconstructed the path of the rod from his preserved skull and concluded that it damaged prefrontal regions involved in decision-making and social behavior. Our instructor added that later historical research suggests Gage recovered some of his former steadiness in the years after the injury, working as a stagecoach driver in Chile, and that the popular story exaggerates how permanent the change was (Macmillan, 2000).

A classmate who works in a memory care unit then described residents whose memories have faded but who still respond to music, touch and familiar routines. She said the families often say the person is gone, and she has learned not to agree.

Gage showed that a brain injury can change who someone is; my father showed that it can leave who someone is while changing what he can do.

What Changed in My Thinking

The seminar did not answer my question the way I expected. I had thought of the self as a single thing that either survives or does not. The discussion showed it as many things: memories, abilities, habits, values, relationships, the way a person treats others. A brain injury can damage some of these and leave others. Gage's injury seems to have changed his judgment and social behavior, parts of what people experience as character. My father's injury changed his speech and his right hand, but not his values, his musical memory or the way he still lights up when his grandson walks in.

Our instructor described the self as a pattern the brain sustains across many systems rather than a thing located in one place. That made sense of both cases. When enough of the pattern changes, as in Gage's case, others experience a different person. When the pattern holds but some means of expressing it are lost, as with my father, the person is still there, harder to reach.

Where the Pattern Lives

The neuroscience behind the instructor's description helped me. Personality and values do not sit in one structure; they depend on networks linking prefrontal regions, which weigh consequences and social rules, with regions that store memories and generate emotion (Kalat, 2019). My father's stroke struck regions for producing speech and moving his right hand, which sit at the edges of those networks rather than at their center. That may be why the parts of him I feared were gone, his humor and warmth, were not gone but blocked by his difficulty getting words out. As his speech has slowly improved, some of the jokes have come back, shorter and slower but recognizably his. I would not have understood that change without knowing which systems the stroke reached and which it spared, and I would have kept grieving a loss that had not fully happened.

What I Will Do Differently

I have stopped asking whether my father is still in there and started asking which parts of the pattern are easiest to reach. Music reaches him. So do the old photographs of his choirs, which he names more easily than he names anything else. I now plan visits around those rather than around conversation. I also stopped finishing his sentences for him, which his speech therapist had asked us to do weeks ago and I had ignored because watching him struggle was hard.

The Harder Version

I cannot say what would happen to my view if his values had changed rather than his speech. If a stroke had made him cruel, as some injuries change people, I do not know whether I would say he was still himself. The seminar gave me a better question, but not that answer.

References

Damasio, H., Grabowski, T., Frank, R., Galaburda, A. M., & Damasio, A. R. (1994). The return of Phineas Gage: Clues about the brain from the skull of a famous patient. Science, 264(5162), 1102-1105. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.8178168

Kalat, J. W. (2019). Biological psychology (13th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Macmillan, M. (2000). An odd kind of fame: Stories of Phineas Gage. MIT Press.