Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 THE ASSOCIATION AREAS OF THE CORTEX 
In a freak accident in 1848, an explosion drove a 3-feet-long iron bar completely 
through the skull of railroad worker Phineas Gage, where it remained after the acci-
dent. Amazingly, Gage survived and, despite the rod lodged through his head, a few 
minutes later seemed to be fi ne. 
But he wasn’t. Before the accident, Gage was hard-working and cautious. After-
ward, he became irresponsible, drank heavily, and drifted from one wild scheme to 
another. In the words of one of his physicians, “he was ‘no longer Gage’ ” (Harlow, 
1869, p. 14). 
What had happened to the old Gage? Although there is no way of knowing for 
sure, we can speculate that the accident injured the region of Gage’s cerebral cortex 
known as the
 association areas 
, which generally are considered to be the site of 
higher mental processes such as thinking, language, memory, and speech (Rowe et 
al., 2000).
The association areas make up a large portion of the cerebral cortex and consist 
of the sections that are not directly involved in either sensory processing or directing 
movement. The association areas control executive functions , which abilities are relat-
ing to planning, goal setting, judgment, and impulse control. 
Much of our understanding of the association areas comes from patients who, 
like Phineas Gage, have suffered some type of brain injury. For example, when parts 
of the association areas are damaged, people undergo personality changes that affect 
their ability to make moral judgments and process emotions. At the same time, people 
with damage in those areas can still be capable of reasoning logically, performing 
calculations, and recalling information (Bechara et al., 1994).
Injuries to the association areas of the brain can produce aphasia , problems with 
language. In Broca’s aphasia , speech becomes halting, laborious, and often ungram-
matical, and a speaker is unable to fi nd the right words. In contrast, Wernicke’s 
aphasia produces diffi culties both in understanding others’ speech and in the produc-
tion of language. The disorder is characterized by speech that sounds fl uent but