Brainwaves: A Cultural History of Electroencephalography

by Cornelius Borck

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781317172802
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/29/2018
Series:	Science, Technology and Culture, 1700-1945
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	334
Sales rank:	383,935
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Cornelius Borck is Professor of History, Theory and Ethics of Medicine and Science and Director of the Institute of History of Medicine and Science Studies at the University of Luebeck, Germany.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Brain Waves Then and Now

1. Electrifying Brain Images
2. Hans Berger’s Long Path to the EEG

Current in the Head

Research Strategies of a Conservative Psychiatrist

The Measure of Psychic Energy

The Course to Current

Amplified Oscillations

Artefacts and Noise

Invitation to Stockholm

3. Electrotechniques of the Live Mind

Cultural Currents 1918–1933

The Bioengineer and Psychodiagnostics

Nerve Apparatus and Psychic Circuits

Thought Rays and Radio-Telepathy

Configurations of Electrotherapy in the Radio Age

Poetics of New Objectivity in Brain Script

The Experimentalization of Daily Life

4. Terra nova: Contexts of Electroencephalographic Explorations

Epistemic Resonances and Material Cultures

Berger’s Further Voyage through Brain Waves

Local Appointment in Buch near Berlin

Acknowledgment with British Understatement

The Leap over the Pond

The Matrix of the Waves

5. Set to and Survey Much!

On the Cultural Practice of a New Technology

Dynamics of Standardization

A Diagnostic Panopticon

Under the Shock Spell

The Electrical Brain at Auschwitz

6. Designing, Tinkering, Thinking

What’s Hidden inside the EEG?

Rapid Vibrations of Thought

The Concert of Cerebral Currents

A German Physiologist’s Lofty Flights

The Brain as a Cybernetic Machine

Brain Theories out of the Model Building-Block Box

Conclusion - Plea for an Open Epistemology