Summary of R. Douglas Fields' Electric Brain

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The boy was shot in the head, and the bullet could not be removed by surgery. It left him paralyzed on one side of his body and suffering from vertigo. He was sent to a mental hospital in Jena, Germany, by his doctor, Hans Berger.

#2 In November 1902, Berger conducted the experiment with the young man. He shaved the man’s head, and then toweled it dry. He took extra care with the area around the head wound, where the missing skull bone had left an irregularly shaped hole covered only by a thin layer of skin and scar tissue.

#3 Dr. Berger was the first to test his theory that mental states interact with physical processes inside the brain. He recorded the young man’s brain pulsations, which were affected by various drugs and changes in body position.

#4 Berger was the first person to document waves of electrical energy radiating out from the human skull, and he was also the first to conduct a human electroencephalogram. But he remains a shadowy figure, as the ethically unpalatable practice of experimenting on patients hardly makes him unique among his contemporaries in psychiatry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822539877

IRB Media

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Insights on R. Douglas Fields's Electric Brain

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The boy was shot in the head, and the bullet could not be removed by surgery. It left him paralyzed on one side of his body and suffering from vertigo. He was sent to a mental hospital in Jena, Germany, by his doctor, Hans Berger.

#2

In November 1902, Berger conducted the experiment with the young man. He shaved the man’s head, and then toweled it dry. He took extra care with the area around the head wound, where the missing skull bone had left an irregularly shaped hole covered only by a thin layer of skin and scar tissue.

#3

Dr. Berger was the first to test his theory that mental states interact with physical processes inside the brain. He recorded the young man’s brain pulsations, which were affected by various drugs and changes in body position.

#4

Berger was the first person to document waves of electrical energy radiating out from the human skull, and he was also the first to conduct a human electroencephalogram. But he remains a shadowy figure, as the ethically unpalatable practice of experimenting on patients hardly makes him unique among his contemporaries in psychiatry.

#5

I traveled to the city of Jena, to see firsthand what might remain of Berger’s work conducted there a century ago. I found a graveyard, little more than a field of green lumps overgrown with ivy, where Berger was buried.

#6

Berger was a neuroanatomist who studied the brain and its temperature. He concluded that changes in mental activity were accompanied by changes in temperature in the brain.

#7

The historic laboratory building that had once housed Berger’s laboratory is now a small library. The librarian showed me some faded photographs of the room filled with Berger’s exotic electronic instruments, but none of Berger’s equipment has been preserved.

#8

Berger’s research showed that the human brain’s energy traveled through the skull and could be detected remotely. He believed that the waves of electricity he detected in the brain were the rippling energetic reverberations between psychic and physical energy.

#9

Berger’s work with telepathy and psychic energy was very controversial in his day, and it is likely one of the reasons his research remained on the fringe. However, his discovery that it is possible to receive the electrical waves of energy radiating out of the brain by placing electrodes on a person’s head proved the interaction between the energy of the mind and the substance of the brain.

#10

Berger’s work established the priority of his discovery, but he shared it narrowly, guarding rather than promoting the fruits of his research.

#11

Interest in mental telepathy, and other forms of ESP, peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1930, Upton Sinclair, renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Jungle, self-published a book detailing his extensive experiments on mental telepathy.

#12

The popularization and sensationalizing of scientific research can have a corrosive effect on how the work itself is perceived within the scientific community.

#13

Berger’s work remained largely unknown until 1934, when Nobel Prize winner Edgar Douglas Adrian drew attention to the phenomenon of electric brain activity by repeating Berger’s experiments in a paper coauthored with Bryan H. C. Matthews and published in a prominent scientific journal, Brain.

#14

Berger’s inspiration came from the mountains of Turin, Italy, where in the 1880s, Angelo Mosso was the first person to record human brain activity. Berger’s early studies on brain volume changes were directly adapted from Mosso’s methods and research.

#15

The process of acclimatization requires ascending slowly to give the body sufficient time to adapt to the drop in oxygen at higher altitudes, which involves a series of fascinating and complicated physiological changes. Acclimatization takes time, and weekend warriors paying guides to help them bag a summit often pay a price for their impatience by becoming very sick.

#16

I wanted to climb Mount Rainier, America’s Mount Blanc, and