Phineas Gage was truly a man with a hole in his head. A railroad construction foreman, Phineas was blasting rock near Cavendish, Vermont, in 1848 when a 13-pound iron rod was shot through his brain. Miraculously, he survived another 11 years and became a textbook case in brain science. But Phineas was forever changed by the accident, and what happened inside his brain tells us a lot about how our brains work and what makes us who we are.