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Joanna Freytag still remembers being in her garden when she got the call. It was Marvin, Edward’s riding buddy. “I’m so sorry, Joanna,” he told her. “I’m so sorry,” he said, again and again, until she cut him off: “What’s going on? Is he dead?”
When Joanna arrived at the hospital, she heard Edward long before she reached his room. “I could hear him cursing up a storm from a mile away,” she recalls. This wasn’t like him: Her husband rarely raised his voice and almost never cursed.
His behavior grew stranger in the coming days. He insisted that the television was mounted too high on the wall and asked Joanna to lower it. He also refused to get dressed. “It took us about two days to finally make him put some clothes on,” she says.
To Joanna, Edward seemed like a different person, but the sudden emergence of his inner toddler was exactly what might be expected from an injury affecting the frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for inhibition and self-control.
Perhaps the most famous case of this kind of injury is that of Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railroad worker who accidentally launched a tamping iron into his head. The three-foot-long metal spike obliterated much of his left frontal lobe and drastically altered his personality, rendering Gage, according to his doctor, “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom).”
Gage recovered and eventually moved to Chile, where he worked as a stagecoach driver. He seems to have largely reclaimed his personality and executive function before he died from an epileptic seizure, 12 years after his accident. There is no record, however, of his developing any talent like the one that Edward soon discovered.
About two weeks after Edward’s crash, Joanna was driving him home after a visit to her mother when Edward reached over and turned on the radio.
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SadieDingfelder
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