Welcome to another edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins, and today I will be sharing the story of Phineas Gage.

I first came across this story when I was around eight or nine years old, watching an episode of Ripley's, believe it or not, with my grandma Betty after school, and it blew my mind.

If you are not familiar with this story, I imagine it will blow yours as well. And blowing one's mind

very central to the story, actually. In 1848, a 25-year-old railroad worker named Phineas Gage

was blown up rocks with dynamite to clear the way for a new rail line in Cavendish, Vermont.

He would drill a hole, place an explosive charge, then pack in sand using a 13-pound metal bar known as a tamping iron.

Finneus likes his job.

He was good at it.

He even gotten his tamping iron specially made by a local blacksmith in investment that probably meant he was planning on having a long career as a railroad foreman.

But that would not happen.

On September 13, 1848, the metal bar created a spark that touched

off the charge, and that in turn drove that tamping iron up and out of that hole so fast, with enough

force to enter Phineas' face through his left cheek, shoot behind his eye socket, and blast right on

out of the top of his head. The tamping iron would land on the

ground some 80 feet away covered in Phineas's blood and brains. And Phineas would land on his back.

He would convulse and twitch, caught in the throes of a seizure for several moments and then

within a few minutes, he would shock everyone around him by standing up,

talking and walking over to sit in an ox cart to take a three-quarter mile trip back into

town where he'd then get out of that ox cart, walk home, sit on the porch, wait to see a doctor,

as if he didn't have a literal hole blasted through the center of his brain.

Words and ideas can change the world.

I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother.

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