Brainwaves: A Cultural History of Electroencephalography

Cornelius Borck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317172802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the history of brain research, the prospect of visualizing brain processes has continually awakened great expectations. In this study, Cornelius Borck focuses on a recording technique developed by the German physiologist Hans Berger to register electric brain currents; a technique that was expected to allow the brain to write in its own language, and which would reveal the way the brain worked. Borck traces the numerous contradictory interpretations of electroencephalography, from Berger's experiments and his publication of the first human EEG in 1929, to its international proliferation and consolidation as a clinical diagnostic method in the mid-twentieth century. Borck's thesis is that the language of the brain takes on specific contours depending on the local investigative cultures, from whose conflicting views emerged a new scientific object: the electric brain.

1 Electrifying brain images

Dark room of the Psychiatric Clinic in Jena. Double doors shut out noises from the outside. A path-breaking discovery is about to be tested that Professor Dr. Hans Berger, director of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Jena, has successfully performed. It involves the recording of thoughts in the form of a jagged curve, the electric script of the human brain.¹

The brainwave graph—the recording of electrical activity by the human brain by means of the electroencephalogram—was a sensation. Technical progress in science had made possible a technique of downright marvelous qualities. It was neither an invention for everyday convenience, nor a new entertainment medium; one could not even foresee any medical use for it. The technique, rather, promised to provide a scientific explanation for a very special aspect of human life: thinking.

Imagine a person seated in a room, working out an arithmetical problem in his head; wires lead from his brain into another room to a recording apparatus. There one merely sees the zigzag course that an indicator traces on a strip of paper, and yet one knows exactly when the man in the adjoining room has begun to calculate, whether the work is taxing him very much, and when he is finished with the calculation.

The literally fantastic potential of this invention, which in 1930 evidently suited contemporary expectation horizons well, invited speculations that vied to outdo each other: “Today they are still secret signs, tomorrow they may perhaps reveal mental and brain illnesses, and the day after tomorrow, one may even be exchanging personal correspondence in brain script.” At the moment of its first description, the jagged curve was doing the rounds as “secret signs” in a new language whose decipherment seemed imminent—with far-reaching consequences for human self-understanding.

This vision did not become reality. Thus far, Hans Berger probably has been one of the privileged few to have ever received a brainwave letter. His American colleague Herbert H. Jasper sent him such a message for Christmas 1938. Even a recipient with little practice in electroencephalography could discern from this rare specimen how the sender’s brain initially produced comparatively slow waves, hence was surely in a resting state, before a brief phase of smaller fluctuations in the second row manifested clear activation with distinctly legible signs taking shape, before the activation waves eventually resumed slower oscillations in the last row (see Figure 1). Berger’s brainwave curves were celebrated as “electric script” in 1930; however, research on those graphs obviously did not follow this direct path to inscription of a jagged pattern that contains substantial meaning. Generally speaking, some time had to elapse before Berger’s fellow scientists began to take any serious interest in brainwaves and the new method for registering them. The, at times, quite fantastical newspaper reports incited skepticism among more critical readers, especially considering that similar sensational reports had always turned out to be quackery in the end. The central role played by electric current in how the nervous system operates had, of course, been known since the great successes of electrophysiology in the nineteenth century. But right after World War I, neurophysiology shifted in the direction of increasingly precise characterizations of the electrical activity of individual nerve fibers and nerve cells. What sense would there be in writing down the total activity of thousands of nerve cells inside the human brain, since very specific functions are ascribable to each area of the brain? Because Berger himself mentioned in his publications encountering problems and interferences, would it not much rather suggest the whole matter was an artifact?

For brainwaves to become an object of scientific experiment, they first had to become connectable to existing research cultures, to serve as their points of departure. The breakthrough for that was the confirmation of Berger’s findings by the English Nobel Prize winner Edgar Douglas Adrian in 1934. The electroencephalogram (EEG), the brainwave curve, became recognized scientific fact.² From this moment on, EEG curves and brainwaves began to pose a series of serious questions, on one hand precisely because they fit so poorly in the knowledge about the electrical activity of individual nerve cells; on the other hand, because the curve pattern presented a noticeable correlation with processes of the psyche. Numerous research groups, above all in America, quickly began to specialize in the new method and produced EEG recordings by the meter, so to speak, as “brainwave factories.” When clearly pathological curve patterns were also found a short while later, from which a series of brain diseases could be diagnosed with a precision hitherto unknown, this application of the new method grew further. But the more curves were drawn and the longer one labored on deciphering the spikes and waves in the EEGs, the more obstinately they resisted decipherment and insertion into physiological or psychological theories.

Figure 1 Season’s greetings in brain script from Herbert H. Jasper to Hans Berger; card from 1938.

The history of brainwaves rather presents itself as a sequence of largely frustrated decoding attempts. Berger failed in his endeavor to pinpoint specific signs of mental exertion. The cartography of the “natural oscillations” (Eigenströme) of individual regions of the cerebral cortex done at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, in Buch on the outskirts of Berlin, was a stable project only as long as it strictly followed the guidelines of Oskar Vogt’s cytoarchitectonic research program. When Adrian found, by electroencephalography, rhythms in the brain that were so idiosyncratic that they threatened to undermine the established theories of neurophysiology, he decided to change his field of research again as a precaution. Jasper maneuvered his experimental system, which had just generated those fine Christmas greetings, into a dead end in the attempt to orient the EEG curves exactly according to electrophysical and cellular processes. Grey Walter hoped to cope with the complexity of EEGs by increasingly refined visualization techniques, and ended up amid machinery instead of coming up with an electrical brain code. After World War II ended, cybernetics funneled research into EEGs for a few years more and it seemed as though a break-through was imminent from designs of electrical brains and psychic automatons. Nevertheless the neurophysiological genesis and psychophysiological significance of brainwaves that the EEG registered so regularly remained controversial.

Nowadays, the key to the brain’s operation is scarcely being sought in the conventional EEG that Berger introduced to the public. The “decade of the brain,” the closing decade of the twentieth century, impelled an already existing trend toward other visualization strategies. The continually improving performance of computers then made them not only capable of defeating human world champions at chess, but also of filtering out individual intermediary steps of specific signal-analytical processes from EEG curves. The identification of gating mechanisms of individual ion channels advanced neurophysiology ever deeper down into molecular dimensions. Brain research probably celebrated its greatest triumph during these years with the revival of the morphological topographic model, long declared obsolete in the intervening period. New visualization techniques constructed images of the “mind at work,”³ in which the functionally active regions of the brain no longer traced curves but lit up as activity zones. The turn away from paradigms of electrical brain script and the revival of the localization doctrine also left their mark in the naming policy of professional associations and congresses, which dropped EEG in their founding names in this decade so as not to lose touch with more up-to-date research orientations.⁴ The new title widely chosen, “Clinical Neurophysiology,” documents more than just the growing distance from basic research. Rejecting the EEG or electroencephalography was supposed to subsume the old curve inscription under an encompassing context of interdisciplinary research methods; but at the same time it secretly also bolstered expectations legitimately attached to such an enterprise: Nowadays no writing from the human brain is being recorded; there is no prospect here anymore for any authentic script, only for physiology. The name alterations document something of a retraction of an unbacked promissory note that had long been relying on electroencephalography unlocking the mind’s secret by technically objective means.

Thus the EEG has almost become a closed object of research, even though it remains a standard process of neurological diagnostics. Research on the EEG does obviously continue, but something has ceased which is not easily circumscribed. This gap is perhaps the shortest formula for the subject of the present work. The history of brainwaves, constructed along the guiding thread of the development of electroencephalography, localizes the “inscription systems” (Friedrich Kittler’s Aufschreibsysteme) of electrical brain script within their material contexts, in order to expose the dynamics and effects of these researches in the interplay between scientific research and culturally determined knowledge production. Scientific research on the human brain as a form of self-enlightenment might have often proceeded historically in an indigenous way but is itself not a naturally given process. Brainwaves were materialized as EEG curves from a complex web of presuppositions, groping preliminary trials, and adjustments of experimental arrangements. The nodal points, at which the EEG became an “epistemic thing” (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger) that posed plausible and graspable questions, formed within a broadly spanned net of technical preconditions, apparatus set-ups, and parallel modelings. Research on the curves finally generated phenomena that allowed a space of knowledge to crystallize around the EEG that stimulated new effects. The present cultural history of electroencephalography aims at a precise analysis of the shapability and adaptability of an electrotechnical inscription process in local research contexts, at the knowledge produced there, and at its effects.

A reconstruction of this forming process can thus reveal the historical conditionality of an apparently natural scientific object. The EEG shaped brainwaves into an electrical brain that could only partly be brought to coincide with the subjects of other branches of brain research. One important characteristic of this electrical brain was its medial and mediatory position between anatomical findings and psychological observations. Unlike neuroanatomical, electrophysiological, and psychological research, electroencephalography allowed observation of the brain “at work.” The experimental setup seemed to guarantee the feasibility of studying in an EEG mental and psychological phenomena at the site of the event; and thus electroencephalography put the mediation between the brain and the intellect on the research agenda in a new way. One of the reasons why the EEG was lastingly productive for decades, without any consensus being reached on the way the electrical brain functioned, is presumably that the technical circuitry between brain, mind, and machine made technical advancement virtually built-in within this science. More and more feedback loops stimulated the search for technical models which, in turn, gave new impulses to this research on the EEG. From the first electron brains up to the designing of brain–computer interfaces, the history of the electrical brain points beyond the period of electroencephalographic research examined here.

Electroencephalography is a case study of the complex history of visualization procedures in brain research. In the last few years the influence of visualization and measurement techniques on the development of the biosciences has become an important area of research analysis in the history of medicine and science.⁵ Numerous case studies have shown how new experimental and instrumental practices formed in specific socio-cultural contexts and how these local cultures, for instance, on the establishment of representational and interpretational conventions, crucially affected the formation and stabilization of new objects of science. Accordingly, representations of scientific knowledge—be they pictorial representations or theories—not only bear superficial traces of their genesis; they themselves are testimonials to and products of their developmental contexts. In addition, these contexts of scientific developments, such as new recording procedures, are epistemologically relevant: A substantial part of the reality and validity of scientific theories and objects is explained by their history.

According to Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis, history of the sciences constitutes not only their memory but their epistemological laboratory.⁶ Dijksterhuis was aiming at a rehabilitation of the context of discovery as opposed to the context of justification (Hans Reichenbach 1938) that had been drawn into the focus of philosophy of science. Only a detailed analysis of the research process within its historical context could provide information about the way scientific rationality operates. Science in the making has long since advanced to a central object of study in the history of science with its various thematic and methodological orientations. In this sense this study understands the electrotechnical exploration of the brain and the psyche as a site at which an electrical brain was shaped out of brainwaves. As a historical epistemology of these researches, this study must form its own connection with the epistemological program of the field of expertise; for, brain research already stakes its own claim as an epistemic laboratory. During the nineteenth century, neuroanatomy and neurophysiology were already working on naturalizing the Kantian a priori and claimed far-reaching philosophical implications for their research because it was a matter of figuring out the biological conditions of human thought and action. During the 1940s, Warren S. McCulloch coined the unwieldy term “experimental epistemology” for his variant of this project.⁷ McCulloch’s experimental epistemology aimed to explain human thought and action through empirical experiment by a combination of electroencephalography, neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and mathematical logic. This project could not, however, secure for electroencephalography the role of a leading science for the postwar period. It remained attractive only as long as cybernetics could hold the convoked sciences together. Now, fifty years later, a new alliance has formed between cognitive science, philosophy of the mind, and the neurosciences, poised to become the leading science of the mind in the twenty-first century. “Naturalizing the mind” is its program.⁸ Neurophysiological descriptions of the correlates of mental phenomena are supposed to be differentiated enough to attain the status of philosophically sufficient statements. Entirely in the sense of McCulloch’s experimental epistemology, the physiology of human brain functions would thus become a new M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments to the German version
• Introduction to the English translation: brainwaves then and now
• 1 Electrifying brain images
• 2 Hans Berger’s long path to the EEG
• 3 Electrotechniques of the live mind
• 4 Terra nova: contexts of electroencephalographic explorations
• 5 Set to and survey much!
• 6 Designing, tinkering, thinking
• 7 Conclusion: plea for an open epistemology
• References
• Figure sources
• Index