ABSTRACT
In July 1929 there appeared in Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten the paper “Über das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen” by Hans Berger, who was a member of the editorial board of this leading German journal for psychiatry founded by Wilhelm Griesinger, in addition to being director of the Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Jena. In this paper Berger reported about a long series of trials on animals and humans to record electric currents in the brain. The end result was a typical curve graph of continuously rhythmical current fluctuations in the brain, for which he wanted to propose the name “Elektrenkephalogramm.” This observation and graphic recording of brainwaves had been his main project for quite a while, to which he had continually reverted as soon as other investigations were completed. The first time was in 1902, right after earning his habilitation degree; then in 1907, after completing research on the correlates of psychic states in volume curve plots of the brain; and in 1910, after working on temperature changes in the brain in relation to exertions of the psyche. All these trials on different kinds of animals had yielded only doubtful results, however. So Berger had redirected his research toward attainable goals. Only after he had assumed the management of the Jena Nervenklinik in 1919 did Berger again begin to occupy himself with the registration of electrical brain activity, this time in experiments not on animals but on humans. On 6 July 1924 he accomplished what to the end of his life he would acknowledge as the first successful EEG experiment. Nonetheless, Berger hesitated five more years before he believed he could finally be certain enough about the matter to submit a first publication. During those five years, he registered over a thousand brainwave plots in almost 200 experiments. These results were so unstable that, time and again, he doubted his observations. On 25 July 1929, shortly after the appearance of his paper, he wrote down in his lab journal, full of expectation: “The EEG is now in everyone’s hands!” (IV, p. 232). 1 Berger’s EEG was hence anything but a chance observation; it was the product of a tough struggle lasting almost three decades, with a preset fixed goal in view—namely: the registration of electrical brain activity in humans.
