To Hans’ surprise, his neighing horse raised his fronts legs then reared back, throwing the young military trainee clear onto the ground. It all happened quickly, his stomach and heart sank as gravity pulled him down to what he believed was certain death at the hooves of oncoming horses that were hauling an artillery battery behind him. The horses, however, came to a halt, and though Hans was injured, the injuries were not life threatening.
The young man was shook up. He had come close to certain death; indeed, life had flashed before his very eyes. He was still buzzing from the episode at the hospital, when he was suddenly informed that a telegram had arrived for him.
It was from his father. Odd, Hans thought, he had never received a telegraphic message from his family before. When he read it, he was surprised. His father wanted to know how he was doing, and if he was fine. He explained that the reason he had sent the telegram was because Hans’ sister, who was miles away, had been overcome by sense of foreboding and urged her father to get in touch with Hans to ensure his well being.
Hans’ mind was blown. How could his sister possibly know he had suffered an accident that had put his life in danger? It was almost impossible to believe, yet the series of events that day, including his father’s message, bellied a hidden truth. Could it be that somehow during the accident, his emotional state had been so intense that he had sent a message via telepathic means to his sister?
Hans was not one for fanciful notions. With an interest in mathematics and astronomy, he was a man of observations, data, and analysis. Assuming that he had sent a telepathic message to his sister, what was the underlying psycho-physical basis of this mental operation?
He could not stop thinking about it. So he made the decision to put aside his interest in the heavens and try to solve this problem of mental telecommunication by enrolling in the faculty of Medicine instead. After completing his studies, he went to work in the University psychiatric clinic where he progressed from assistant, associate, professor, and finally director.
His career was interrupted during the first world war, when he was sent to the front lines in the French Ardennes to provide neuropsychiatric support. It was here where he jotted down the ideas that would one day cement his status as one of the founders of human nervous system electrophysiology.
On July 6, 1924, Herr Doktor Hans Berger recorded the electrical currents of a patient who had undergone brain surgery. He used a galvanometer and electrodes to record the electro-biochemical action on the patient’s cortex and correlate it with mental activity in a series of experiment that were later published in a set of papers entitled ‘On the Electroencephalogram of Man’. EEGs became central to the development of neurophysiology.
I was hanging out at the science centre when I saw a man and a woman seated at opposite ends of a table with their foreheads pressed against an apparatus. On the table, there was a track under a glass surface and a ball in the groove of the track. The pair did not do anything else except sit still with their foreheads firmly pressed against the apparatus. The ball began to move. First, it moved towards the man, but then slowly it began to move the other way. The movement increased until the ball had made it all the way to the woman’s side, at which point, the game came to a stop with the man declared as the winner of the mental battle.
An electric power couple
Over a century ago, when Hans Berger was conducting his studies, the telecommunications revolution was beginning to take off. Electric and magnetic phenomena were being used to transmit long-distance signals via telegraphs and radio. At the same time, biological studies had demonstrated that an animal’s nervous system produced electricity and magnetism. Could it be that the human nervous system, just like a radio or telegraph, was also capable of transmitting long-distance signals via electromagnetism?
Throughout the course of the day, our brain undergoes various metabolic changes that produce heat, blood flow, chemical interactions, and electricity. Dr. Berger studied these processes and correlated them with mental phenomena. He developed and studied the EEG apparatus that allowed him to detect and discover that the brain was capable of producing different waveforms during mental (alpha) and metabolic (beta) activities. As it is usually the case when a new paradigm arrives on the scientific and cultural block, his findings were received with skepticism and even shunned. The brain wasn’t an electric machine. That’s preposterous! Facts are a stubborn thing, however, and later his ideas became accepted by the scientific community.
It was my turn to test my mental prowess against an opponent of the fairer sex. I put my forehead on the band, facing the ball in the middle of the table. The game instructions indicated that movement of the ball depended on one’s state of relaxation. The more relaxed a player was, the more the ball would move towards the opponent. Relaxation could be accomplished by closing one’s eyes, focusing on breathing, or visualizing a calm scene. So to win the game, the player had to out-relax the opponent.
During the mental match, I was so mellow, I nearly broke the machine and injured my opponent with a missile of alpha-wave relaxation. Heh. Okay, it didn’t happen quite like that. As a matter of fact, I was beaten like an anxious alley dog. 😌 To be fair, there were extraneous variables (e.g., beer) that had altered the metabolic state of my brain during the game. Relaxing was difficult, and I felt a little tense because of my competitive nature, and the audience of curious onlookers. I specially began to freak out when I saw the ball move towards me while my opponent maintained a Buddha-like peaceful demeanor. I was trying to relax using every trick I knew in the Pranayama book, but I was also trying to mentally move the ball like a boulder, which likely caused a hypothalamic waveform storm that led to my defeat at the hands of my wily and very chilled opponent. I showed up to the neural fight with a spike instead of flowers.
The forehead apparatus on the table was able to detect and translate brain electricity into ball movement. No need for intrusive electrodes. The way I understand it, approximately 10,000 neurons in the top layer of the cerebral cortex need to fire in unison for a signal to be detected by the EEG. The brain contains about 86 billion neurons with 100-150 trillion synapses, but only the top 6 mm are used for electrical measurements.
I think that Hans Berger would’ve been impressed by how his scientific endeavours and ideas came to define an entire field. As well as how technology has changed and become more sensitive. He would’ve been less impressed by my performance.
What about telepathy? I won’t lie. Like Berger, the only reason I followed this rabbit into the neural hole was because of the thrilling prospect of learning more about telepathy from a scientific perspective. As I played the game, I felt that there was something ‘spooky’ about seeing the ball move back and forth as my opponent and I tried to alter our own mental states. I also felt odd having a machine read and transform those mental states because this opened up a whole new set of sci-fi possibilities that will make telepathy seem quaint and outdated. Other people were waiting to use the machine, so I didn’t dwell on it too much. With tail between my legs, I conceded defeat to my opponent while trying to hide my inner rage with a charming smile. All in good fun to become the best neuroballer 😜
The over-dramatized events in this post were synthesized from the following sources:
Hans Berger (1873–1941): the German psychiatrist who recorded the first electrical brain signal in humans 100 years ago
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/advan.00119.2024
Hans Berger (1873-1941)--the history of electroencephalography
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16334737/
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