This year marks the centenary of the discovery of human brain waves. Few people know the story of this amazing discovery because the true story was erased and lost to history. Almost two decades ago I visited the laboratories of pioneering scientists in Germany and Italy in search of answers.. What I learned overturned accepted history and revealed a horrific story of Nazis, brainwaves, war between Russia and Ukraine, and suicide. This history resonates with current events—Russia and Ukraine recently passed a grim 1,000-day milestone as an excuse to fight the Nazis—revealing how history, science, and society are intertwined.
Human brain wavesthe oscillating electrical waves that constantly sweep through the brain tissue, change with ours thoughts and perceptions. Their value in medicine is incalculable. They show doctors all kinds of neurological and psychological disorders and guide the hands of neurosurgeons as they remove diseased brain tissue that causes seizures. Recently appreciated, their role in the healthy brain is transforming our fundamental understanding of how the brain processes information. Like all kinds of waves, electrical waves traveling through the brain create synchrony (think water waves in boats); In the case of brain waves, what is synchronized is the activity between populations of neurons.
Who discovered brain waves? What did they think they found? Why was there no Nobel Prize?
About supporting science journalism
If you like this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism subscribe. By purchasing a subscription, you’re helping to ensure a future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas that shape our world.
In the most common accounts, a lonely doctor, Hans Berger, recorded the first human brain waves of his patients in a mental hospital in the German city of Jena (then part of East Germany) in 1924. He didn’t tell anyone what he was doing, and kept his important discoveries a secret for five years. When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, mental hospitals became the epicenter of forced sterilization and “euthanasia” to promote “racial hygiene.” Some of the methods developed in these facilities were precursors to industrialized killing in concentration camps. As head of the mental hospital in Jena, Berger would be involved. Biographies at the time of my visit stated that Berger committed suicide in 1941 due to Nazi persecution.
”Berger was not a supporter of Hitler and therefore had to give up his University service; because he did not expect this, he was seriously hurt… (This) gave him a depression and eventually killed him,” wrote the psychiatrist Rudolf Lemke, in a 1956 memoir. He worked under Lemke Berger.
I found this strange. Wouldn’t the Nazis have rejected Berger like they did He cleared 20 percent of German academics In 1933, and mercilessly expelled or “liquidated” dishonest politicians, administrators and others?
I found out in Jena that Lemke was a member of the NSDP (Nazi Party). He worked in Erbgesundheitsgericht (Basic Health Court) for forced sterilization of the mentally and physically disabled, generally the physically disabled, psychiatric patients, alcoholics, among others. Like many others in power, Lemke remained in Jena after the war, and his anti-Semitic and anti-gay views were covered up by the authorities. He was director of the Psychiatric Clinic in Jena from 1945 to 1948.
After World War II, Jena fell under the control of the Soviet Union, and documents showing the widespread coverage were lost or destroyed. When I visited Berger’s hospital, I met with neuroscientist Christoph Redies and medical historian Susanne Zimmermann, who recently obtained Soviet records after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berger was, in fact, revealed to be a Nazi sympathizer. He killed himself in the hospital, not in protest, but because he was suffering from depression, he says. In taking his own life, Berger’s death mirrored the suicides of many others of the era who participated in Nazi atrocities.
Digging through dusty lab notebooks containing the earliest recordings of human brainwaves, Zimmermann noted marginal anti-Semitic comments written alongside them. Berger then pulled out piles of records of proceedings in the forced sterilization court he once served on.eugenics” wanted to weed out the “unfits” from parenthood. Hearing them read aloud brought to life the horrors that had happened there, as people begged the judge not to sterilize them or their relatives. Berger denied all appeals, sentencing them all to forced sterilization.
The hospital in Jena, Germany, where Berger discovered brain waves.
Berger’s EEG research was not well received. A believer in mental telepathy, Berger thought that brain waves might be the basis of mental telepathy, but eventually rejected the idea. Instead, he believed that brain waves were a form of psychic energy. Like other forms of energy, psychic energy waves could not be created or destroyed, but they could interact with physical phenomena. Based on this, he believed that mental cognitive work would cause temperature changes in the brain. He explored this idea by inserting rectal thermometers into the brains of his psychiatric patients while they performed cognitive tasks during surgery.
Berger’s research was unknown outside of Germany until 1934 when Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Edgar Adrian published his experiments in the prestigious journal. the brain. Adrian confirmed that so-called “Berger waves” exist, but implicitly mocked them by showing that they changed when the eyes opened and closed in a water beetle, just as they did in the Nobel laureate’s brain. he did the same. Adrian never did any further research on brain waves.
Berger is credited with discovering brain waves in humans, but his studies with animals predated his work. Berger also did not invent the methods he used to monitor brain activity. Adolf Beck applied techniques previously used in Lwów (Poland) in 1895 and Angelo Mosel in Turin (Italy).
In contrast to Berger, Adolf Beck’s animal studies aimed to understand how the brain works when neurons communicate via electrical impulses. At the height of his research a Russian invasion stopped his scientific work. In 1914 Lwów was taken over by the Russian invaders and renamed Lviv. Beck was captured and imprisoned in Kiev, then part of Russia (now Kiev, Ukraine).
While in prison he wrote to the famous Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov for help, and eventually Pavlov managed to get Becken released.
Beck returned to his research in Lviv, and the next logical step was to search for brain waves in humans, but during World War II the Germans invaded. A concentration camp was established in Lviv where the Jewish population was exterminated. As an intellectual and a Jew, Beck was targeted. When Beck was taken to the concentration camp in 1942, he swallowed cyanide, ending his life rather than being taken over by the Nazis.
Notably, two pioneering brainwave scientists committed suicide from Nazism—one as a perpetrator of the Nazis, the other as a victim of the Nazis.
Berger’s grave in Jena.
Neither Berger nor Beck were unknown the first to record brain waves. That discovery was made by a London doctor 50 years before Berger! This amazing discovery was lost to science because the ideas were so far ahead of their time, the brain was an enigma and the world was lit by gas lamps and powered by steam. Imagine how much more advanced brain science and medicine would be now if this scientific discovery made in 1875 had not been lost to history for half a century.
The first person to discover brain waves was the London doctor Richard Caton. Caton reported his discovery of brain waves recorded in rabbits and monkeys in 1875 at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association in Edinburgh. He achieved this by using a primitive device, a wire galvanometer, where a small mirror is suspended on a wire between magnets. When an electrical current (in this case from the brain) passes through the device, the string twists slightly like a compass needle next to a magnet. The oscillating electrical currents detected in the brain were not measured in volts, but in millimeters of deflection of the light beam bouncing off the mirror. His introduction to “The Electric Currents of the Brain” shows that with this primitive instrument the doctor correctly deduced the most important aspects of brain waves. “In every brain so far studied, the galvanometer has indicated the existence of electrical currents… The electrical currents in the gray matter seem to be related to its function…”.
Ironically, I traveled the world to research the discovery of brain waves, the first person to do so, Richard Caton, presented his findings in the US in 1887 at Georgetown University while visiting his family in Catonsville, Maryland. The town, which was settled by his relatives in 1787, is 30 miles from my home, near the Baltimore-Washington Airport, from which I often flew. my global search But that fact, like his underappreciated brainwave research, was lost to history. “Read my paper on the electrical currents of the brain,” he wrote in his journal. “It was well received, but most of the audience didn’t understand it.”
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific
