One hundred years have passed since the discovery of waves in the human brain. But few people know the story of this amazing discovery because the real story has been hidden and lost to history!
About 20 years ago, Fields visited the laboratories of pioneering scientists in Germany and Italy in search of answers to some of his questions. What Fields learned turned accepted history upside down, revealing a chilling story involving Nazis, brainwaves, the war between Russia and Ukraine, and suicide. The story uncovered resonates with contemporary events, showing how history, science and society are intertwined.
Human brainwaves - electrical vibrations constantly propagating through brain tissue - change depending on our thoughts and perceptions. The importance of these waves in medicine is invaluable. Brain waves help detect all sorts of neurological and psychological disorders and guide neurosurgeons in removing diseased brain tissue that provokes some seizures.
Their role in the healthy brain is just beginning to be understood, and it is changing our fundamental understanding of how the brain processes information. Like all waves, the electrical waves traveling through the brain are synchronized. This synchronization can be thought of as water waves moving boats up and down. Of course, in the case of brain waves, the activity between groups of neurons is synchronized.
So who discovered brain waves? What do they think they discovered during that discovery? Why didn't they win the Nobel or any other prize?
According to the most common versions, Hans Berger, a reclusive physician, recorded the first human brainwaves in 1924 from patients at a psychiatric hospital in Jena, Germany, a city that later became part of East Germany. He told no one about what he had done and kept his important discoveries secret for five years. When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, psychiatric hospitals became the epicenter of forced sterilization and euthanasia to ensure “racial hygiene.” Some of the techniques developed in these institutions were precursors to industrial methods of killing in concentration camps.
Berger, as director of the psychiatric hospital in Jena, was probably at the heart of these developments. The biographies Fields read during his visit to the hospital stated that Berger committed suicide in 1941 as a result of Nazi persecution. Psychiatrist Rudolf Lemke, who worked with Berger at the time, wrote in his 1956 memorial:
“Berger was not a supporter of Hitler and was therefore forced to resign his position at the university. He did not expect this and was greatly hurt.” As a result, he became depressed, which ended in his death.”
To Fields, this situation was strange. Couldn't the Nazis have fired Berger as they had purged 20 percent of German scientists in 1933? Why would a regime that ruthlessly expelled or even “liquidated” disloyal politicians, administrators, and others treat Berger differently?
During his visit to Jena, Fields learned that Lemke was actually a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). At the Court for Hereditary Health (German “Erbgesundheitsgericht”), Lemke was in charge of the forced sterilization of the “mentally and physically unfit,” meaning physically disabled, psychiatric patients, alcoholics, and other such groups. Like many other officials, Lemke remained in Jena after the war, and his anti-Semitic and homophobic views were hidden by the authorities. From 1945 to 1948, he was director of Jena's psychiatric clinic.
After World War II, Jena came under the control of the Soviet Union, and documents revealing this massive cover-up were either lost or destroyed. When Fields visited Berger Hospital, he met with neuroscientist Christoph Redis and Susanne Zimmermann, a medical historian who gained access to the Soviet documents after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These conversations revealed that Berger was actually a Nazi sympathizer. According to Zimmermann, Berger committed suicide in the hospital not in protest, but as a result of self-inflicted depression. Berger's suicide was similar to the suicides of many other people involved in Nazi atrocities at the time.
Analyzing a dusty laboratory notebook containing the earliest human brainwave recordings, Zimmermann noticed anti-Semitic notes that Berger had written in the margins of the pages. He also found a mass of case notes from the forced sterilization court where Berger worked. This court was part of the “eugenics” movement, which at the time sought to prevent “unfit” people from becoming parents. Reading court transcripts aloud recreated horrifying moments when people begged the court not to sterilize them or their loved ones. Berger, however, rejected all of these pleas and sentenced all court participants to forced sterilization.
Berger's EEG research did not meet with approval. Berger believed in the existence of telepathy and hypothesized that brain waves might be the basis of telepathy. However, he eventually abandoned this idea and instead came to believe that brain waves were a form of psychic energy. According to Berger, mental energy, like other forms of energy, cannot be destroyed or created out of nothing, but can interact with physical phenomena. Based on this idea, he hypothesized that the activity of cognition would create temperature changes in the brain. He tested this idea by inserting rectal thermometers into the brains of his mentally ill patients and then attempted to measure temperature changes in their brains during surgery as they performed cognitive tasks.
Berger's research was little known outside of Germany until 1934, when Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Edgar Adrian published it in the prestigious journal Brain. Adrian confirmed the existence of so-called “Berger waves.” But he also ridiculed Berger's ideas about brain waves by showing that the change in brain waves when a water beetle opens and closes its eyes matches the change in brain waves when a Nobel Prize-winning scientist opens and closes his eyes. Adrian did not conduct further research on brain waves.
Berger is known for discovering brain waves in humans, but animal studies preceded his work. Therefore, Berger did not invent the methods he used to observe brain activity. He used methods that had already been used in animal experiments conducted in 1895 by Adolf Beck in Lvov, Poland, and Angelo Mosel in Turin, Italy.
Unlike Berger, Adolf Beck's work on animals was aimed at understanding how the brain works when neurons communicate through electrical impulses. At the height of his research, the Russian invasion forced him to stop his scientific work. In 1914, Lvov was captured by the Russians and renamed Lvov. Beck was captured and imprisoned in Kiev, which was part of Russia at the time. While in prison, he wrote a letter to the famous Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov asking for help. Pavlov eventually secured Beck's release.
After his release from prison, Beck returned to his research in Lvov. The next logical step was to research brain waves in humans. However, during World War II, Lviv was occupied by the Germans and a concentration camp was set up in the city where the Jewish population was massacred. As an intellectual and a Jew, Beck became a target for the Nazis. In 1942, when they arrived to take Beck to the concentration camp, he chose to end his life by swallowing cyanide rather than be killed by the Nazis.
Amazingly, two scientists, one a Nazi criminal and the other a Nazi victim, pioneers of brainwave research, committed suicide because of Nazism.
Berger and Beck did not know that they were not the first to record brain waves. In fact, brain waves had already been discovered by a doctor in London 50 years before Berger! This amazing discovery was lost in the scientific world because it was so ahead of its time. The discovery dates back to a time when the brain was still a mystery, when the world was lit by gas lamps and powered by steam. Can you imagine how far brain science and medicine would be today if this scientific discovery, made in 1875, had not been overshadowed by history by half a century?
The first person to discover brain waves was Richard Caton, a London physician. Caton announced his discovery, having recorded brain waves in rabbits and monkeys, at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association in Edinburgh in 1875.
He made his discovery using a string galvanometer, a primitive device with a small mirror suspended on a string between magnets. The oscillating electric currents found in the brain were measured not in volts but in millimeters of deflection of the light beam reflected from the mirror. The published abstract of the paper, entitled “Electrical Currents of the Brain,” showed that with this primitive device Cato had accurately determined the most important aspects of brain waves:
“The galvanometer showed the presence of electric currents in all the brains so far investigated. The gray matter appears to have something to do with the function of electric currents.”
Ironically, Fields traveled the world in search of the discovery of brain waves. However, he learned that Richard Caton, the first person to make the discovery, presented his findings in 1887 at Georgetown University in Catonsville, Maryland, where he had traveled to visit his family. This town was only 30 miles from Fields' home, near the Baltimore-Washington Airport, which Fields used frequently when traveling the world. Cato wrote in his diary about his underappreciated brainwave research, lost in the dusty pages of history
“I read my paper on the electrical currents of the brain, which was well received but not understood by most of the audience.”
Author : R. Douglas Fields
Translator: Ilkin Mammadov
