Summary of R. Douglas Fields' Electric Brain , livre ebook

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#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.

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Life Sciences

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454 Life Sciences

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Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	23 juin 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9798822539877
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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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 have an MRI before and after to see if mountaineering could be done safely. I couldn’t find anyone who would do the exam for me, so I went to see Dr. Fayed, who had done the original study on climbers’ brains.

#17

I was climbing Mount Rainier with my son, Dylan, and we decided to wait out the storm in our tent. I carried a pulse oximeter to monitor my oxygen saturation and my heart rate. My blood oxygen dropped to 75 percent, while my heart rate rocketed to 165 beats per minute.

#18

After returning to sea level at the Seattle waterfront, the oxygen-rich air felt thick as cream. It was easy to see why Mosso had studied altitude’s effects.

#19

I met with Dr. Dario Cantino, an expert on Angelo Mosso, who was translating his work from Italian to English. I visited the library where Mosso’s notebooks and instruments were kept.

#20

I travel to Spain to visit Dr. Nicolás Fayed, a radiologist at the Clínica Quirón de Zaragoza, who has been studying the brains of climbers. He points out that the brain region severed in a prefrontal lobotomy is shriveled like a dried fruit.

#21

The most severe damage was suffered by José, who could not remember his own phone number. He had lesions in the forebrain, which are caused by small strokes or hemorrhages.

#22

I had an MRI scan of my brain, which was extremely loud. The doctors and technicians were behind a plate glass window watching the scan on computer screens, but I couldn’t see if they were disturbed by what they saw.

#23

The director of the Psychiatry Clinic at the University of Jena, Hans Berger, committed suicide by hanging in 1941. He was seen as a victim of the Nazi regime, and his suicide was either an act of protest against the Nazis or an act of desperation driven by Nazi reprisals against him.

#24

After the war, Jena came under Soviet control, but many of the people who held positions of authority at the university and hospital during the war remained in charge afterward, and they promoted cover-ups and discouraged the Soviets from investigating former Nazis.

#25

The anatomy department at the university has a great collection of human anatomical specimens and skeletons. These specimens are priceless and essential aids for teaching human anatomy.

#26

The legacy of Hans Berger is colored by a similar uncertainty. Was he a man a century ahead of his time, struggling with primitive instruments to achieve intellectual greatness, or was he a quack using simple devices in bizarre and sometimes cruel ways to find evidence for the paranormal.

#27

Berger’s decision to search for electrical activity in the brain was not the result of a brilliant leap of genius. It had been known since the eighteenth century that signals are transmitted in the nervous system by bioelectricity, but how the nervous system worked was a mystery.

#28

The first experimental approach to localizing brain functions was to remove bits of brain tissue from animal subjects and observe the resulting effects. This produced useful insights, but other times the approach failed to provide any clues.

#29

The most sensitive instrument available for detecting electrical phenomena in the brain and nervous system was the string galvanometer, which was used to record the slightest deflection of a magnetized needle. The response of the needle was magnified by a mirror, which was then bounced off a ruled scale.

#30

The Wiedemann galvanometer, designed by Gustav H. Wiedemann, Hermann von Helmholtz, and John Tyndall, was the most advanced instrument of its kind in 1874. It was used by Adolf Beck in his dissertation research, after he entered the University of Jagiellonski in Kraków in 1886.

#31

Beck was able to locate where in the brain different senses are processed. He noticed that the beam of light quivered even when he was not stimulating a nerve. These were not just random vibrations, but signs of electrical energy surging through the brain.

#32

Beck found that sensory input quelled the ongoing electrical activity in the brain. He found it reasonable that stimulation of some centres causes a blocking of activity in others, and that this active state existed in those centres.

#33

In 1895, Beck had accepted the chair of the newly established department of physiology at the University of Lwów, which was then in the Austrian section of partitioned Poland. The city of Lwów has changed hands many times in the upheavals of the past two centuries, and at the start of the twentieth it was a diverse center of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish culture.

#34

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, and Lviv was taken by the Germans. The first of these massacres was carried out on July 3, 1941, when Nazi occupation forces arrested twenty-five Polish academics and their families. They were taken to a repurposed dormitory, where they were tortured and killed.

#35

The history of neuroscience is not linear; it is a vortex, repeatedly sucking the inhabitants back into the same whirlpool of disaster, destruction, and death.

#36

The world is a small place. A few miles from my home in Baltimore, Maryland, is the town of Catonsville, which was originally settled by Europeans in 1720. In 1887, Richard Caton, an MD from Liverpool, England, visited the town and presented his research on electrical phenomena in cerebral grey matter.

#37

The isolation of scientists in different countries speaking and writing in different languages can lead to important discoveries going unseen by the larger scientific community.

#38

In 1890, Beck published a summary of his dissertation research detailing his recordings of brainwaves, which kicked off a flurry of controversy over w