ABSTRACT
With the publication of the human electroencephalogram in 1929, the EEG left the realm of the shadows of the Jena director’s office and experimental room. Only in historical retrospect was this step reconstructed as the beginning of a coherent field of scientific research. Only after Berger’s studies had been received by other researchers and his trials had been made to resonate with other neurophysiological, neuropsychiatric, and psychological experimental systems, could Berger’s EEG be stylized as the point of departure of something. 1 When the fortieth anniversary of Berger’s first EEG paper was being celebrated during the VIIth International EEG Congress, the by then almost eighty-year-old keynote speaker, Douglas Adrian, explained why he had not reviewed Berger’s work before 1934 and why there was a five-year delay before international research on the EEG began:
If we want yet another excuse for our lack of curiosity about work on the brain, it might be added that most electrophysiologists then were engaged in work on the peripheral nervous system and not on the central. We were reaping the harvest due to the new techniques of electronic amplification. This was giving important results in the problems of transmitting information by nerve fibres and most of us probably thought we were better employed in following up this line of advance than in paying attention to the much more complex field of the cerebral cortex. 2
