Andreas Killen - Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War

During the 1950s, electroencephalography (EEG) readings became common features of scientific and popular scientific works. Death, formerly defined by heart failure, was redefined as brain failure, measurable by EEG. Its scribbles became virtually a symbol of life itself.

T he resort town of Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson, Quebec, is located in the Laurentian Mountains about an hours drive north of Montreal. It has long been a vacation destination for the inhabitants of that city. It was in that picturesque setting, in late summer 1953, that a group of leading scientists from Europe and North America gathered to take part in a symposium devoted to the topic Brain Mechanisms and Consciousness. During that weeklong gathering, representatives from the fields of neurophysiology, neurosurgery, psychology, and psychiatry, along with a lone psychoanalyst, met in a large chalet called the Alpine Inn to present their work and discuss the current state of a field that was then undergoing dramatic change.

Though dominated by North Americans, the group was transatlantic in composition, including figures from France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and one from Japan. Among those gathered in what the published proceedings called this inspiring mountain setting were several in particular who are central to the story told in this book. They included the eminent neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute, best known for his pioneering work on the treatment of patients suffering from epilepsy. Also present was his colleague the psychologist Donald O. Hebb of McGill University in Montreal, an occasional collaborator of Penfield and the author of the recently published book The Organization of Behavior (1949), later recognized as a founding text of modern neuroscience (claimed by some to be second in importance, in the history of biology, only to Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species). From the United States came a diverse group that included the Harvard neurophysiologist Robert Morison and the Yale psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie, another central figure in this story. The United Kingdom was represented by two men, Edgar Adrian, a 1932 Nobel laureate in physiology, and W. Grey Walter, both closely associated with the development of electroencephalography (EEG), one of the revolutionary medical technologies of the era. Through its readings of brain-wave activity, EEG had opened up new pathways for the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy, the uncanny disease long seen as a form of sacred possession, which was fully recognized as a disorder of the brain only in the twentieth century. Grey Walter, the last of this books main protagonists, was the most colorful presence at the symposium. A scientific maverick based at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, England, he was a neurophysiologist, cybernetician, and science fiction author and the inventor of flicker, a method of triggering epileptic seizures by means of strobe, or rhythmically flashing light. Walters 1953 book The Living Brain has an important place in this story: it did more to introduce midcentury brain science to the public than any other single work, and its account of flicker went on to enjoy a strange prominence within the 1960s counterculture.

The Laurentian Symposium was dominated by discussion of the implications of recent research that, by shedding new light on the integrative action occurring in the brain, had inspired reconsideration of the relationship between brain and mind. In the words of one participant, the central question of the proceedings was to clarify how conscious experience may be related to neuronal mechanisms in the intricate circuits of the brain. Speakers explored this question in papers on such topics as memory, learning, perception and attention, sleep and wakefulness, and illnesses ranging from epilepsy to schizophrenia.

Though it was hardly possible for the participants in the symposium to foresee the later emergence of neuroscience (a term first coined in the 1960s), they shared a belief that recent developments in their fields had brought them to the threshold of major breakthroughs. What was the source of that belief? In part it was fueled by the emergence of new techniques of studying brain activity, among them EEG, which became emblematic of an era of scientific advance that promised to open up areas long seen as off limits to inquiry. We live, proclaimed a midcentury NIH publication dedicated to the medical applications of brain science, in a world of marvels, of inventions undreamed of only a generation agorockets, space travel, machines of incredible complexity. Yet for sheer complexity, the pamphlet continued, no technological marvel could compete with the brain. In ways that had only recently come to be fully appreciated, the brain was a continually active organ: thinking, of course, but also constantly regulating vital functions such as body temperature and breathing in order to maintain the complex state known as homeostasis, without which life could not continue. Drawing from cybernetics, the interdisciplinary field whose emergence after World War II helped shape the new paradigm of the ever-active brain, the pamphlet went on to describe the complex flows of information that operated continuously throughout the nervous system, even during sleep. Much of this information flow took place below the level of consciousness, though in dreams or in the hallucinations that accompanied some neurological disorders it manifested itself in vivid forms. For this marvelous organ was not without its vulnerabilities: injury, shock, or stress, and the resulting impaired functioning, demanded precise medical intervention. The new picture of brain activity captured by techniques such as EEG meant that such intervention was now at last possible for diseases like epilepsy, the ancient scourge of man that had so long baffled medical science.

The uses of EEG were not confined simply to the study of illness. Participants stressed that patterns of brain-wave activity could now be correlated with mental functions such as learning, attention, and memory. According to the French neurophysiologist Alfred Fessard, psychologists had hitherto fashioned a science based purely on behavior, taking no account whatsoever of consciousness, an entity they deemed too subjective to be amenable to scientific inquiry. Consciousness was the incommunicable of psychic activity, best left to poets, philosophers, and mystics. But that attitude, Fessard asserted, was increasingly untenable in the new era of brain sciencean era in which skilled surgeons such as Wilder Penfield were beginning, so to speak, to experiment on consciousness and raise the question of its localization in the brain. Hitherto most brain activity had taken place, as it were, offstage, scientifically speaking. But new forms of observation, measurement, and experimentation had ushered in an era of research in which the drama of consciousness itself was put onto center stage. This was, as some scholars have suggested, the beginning of the era of the explorable brain.