Hans Berger: From Psychic Energy to the EEG

Understanding Berger’s path to the EEG within the context of his own scientific era and life experiences highlights both the familiar and the foreign in Berger's story, and provides a historical prelude to the modern investigation of the brain and its functions.

Abstract

Electroencephalography has served as one of the fundamental tools of clinical neurology for over a half-century.The spontaneous electrical rhythms of the mammalian brain were first demonstrated in the 1870s by Liverpool physiologist Richard Caton, and were subsequently investigated by Napoleon Cybulski, Adolf Beck, Fleischl von Marxow, and others.The development of the human electroencephalogram (EEG), however, can be traced to only one man: the German psychiatrist Hans Berger (1873-1941). Although Berger's work has been the subject of anniversary reflections (Gloor 1969;Jung 1963), a more comprehensive view of this unusual man and his remarkable invention is only now beginning to emerge (Millett 2001). Understanding Berger's path to the EEG within the context of his own scientific era and life experiences highlights both the familiar and the foreign in Berger's story, and provides a historical prelude to the modern investigation of the brain and its functions. Indeed, a century after Berger's first psychophysical experiments, the connection between cerebral blood flow and neural activity, a critical relationship for Berger's psychophysical research, is fundamental to modern functional brain imaging. [End Page 522]