Phineas Gage was a foreman on a railroad crew who suffered brain damage in a blasting accident. After the accident he lost interest in his job and had difficulty maintaining any goal-directed behaviors. He seemed apathetic and capable of only shallow emotions. The damaged part of his brain was probably the ______.

In the frontal lobe, located at the front of the brain (forehead), action and movement planning takes place, as well as abstract thinking. It includes the motor cortex and the prefrontal cortex.

The motor cortex controls and coordinates voluntary motor skills, with the motor cortex of the right hemisphere controlling the left side of the individual's body, while that of the left hemisphere controlling the right side. Trauma in this area can cause muscle weakness or paralysis.

The activity in an individual's frontal lobe increases only when he is faced with a difficult task in which he will have to discover a sequence of actions that minimizes the number of manipulations necessary to solve it. The decision of which movement sequences to activate and in what order, in addition to evaluating the result, is made by the frontal cortex, located at the front of the frontal lobe. Its functions include abstract and creative thinking, fluency of thought and language, affective responses and the capacity for emotional connections, social judgment, will and determination for action and selective attention. Injuries in this region cause the individual to be obstinately attached to strategies that do not work or that fail to develop a correct sequence of actions.