The MNI centroid above is a manual override of the auto-scaffolded value. The HRA-to-MNI affine registration drifts at the brain extremes (the landmarks used to fit the affine cluster at moderate eccentricities), and the auto-derived frontal-pole coord placed the pole at Y = -49, behind the central sulcus. The corrected value of (-30, 60, -2) is anatomically typical for left frontal pole on the MNI152 template.

Phineas Gage, the most famous frontal-lobe-injury patient in the nineteenth-century medical literature, survived a tamping-iron passing through his skull in 1848 but emerged with the personality change that gave the frontal lobes their modern reputation. The lesion has been reconstructed twice from his preserved skull, most authoritatively by Hanna Damasio and colleagues in 1994. The reconstruction places the damage in the left ventromedial prefrontal cortex extending to the frontal pole, with the right hemisphere largely spared.

BA 10’s apparent role in metacognition is more recent. Subjects with focal frontopolar damage can perform well on standard executive-function tests (Stroop, Wisconsin Card Sort) while showing reduced confidence-accuracy correspondence on perceptual decisions. Their metacognitive sensitivity (the ability to know when they’re right) drops while their first-order task performance remains intact.