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Show Electric Waves in Human Brain Are Studied by Science Currents Vary During Sleep or Wakefulness TS LIFE electrical? A Through the ages man has tried to discover or to explain that mysterious something which is life the force that animates a mass of blood, bones and flesh. At one time, when scientists were rapidly learning one fact after another about the composition, structure and function of the human body, optimistic persons were sure that these scientists would finally fi-nally unravel the wonder of wonders life, itself. The idea that scientists might some day use this knowledge to build a robot and then find a way to breathe life into him will apparently ap-parently never be realized. Life Is Mystery. "The miracle of life itself the fact that to certain material processes proc-esses consciousness is added can never be explained," Prof. Hans Berger of the University of Jena, Germany, now declares in a report to Research and Progress. Professor Berger is the man who started the wave of experiments on what are popularly known as "brain waves." These are the tracings on paper of the electric currents which arise in the brain. All activities of life are accompanied accompa-nied by electrical impulses, the cur- rent thus produced being called bioelectric. bio-electric. The English scientist, Caton, was the first who showed that electric currents arise in the brains of the higher animals, dogs and apes. Fifty years later, in 1924, Professor Profes-sor Berger showed the existence of these currents in man and devised a method of leading these currents off from the brain so that they can be amplified and charted or recorded, record-ed, appearing as wavy lines on paper. Brain Always Active. Recent study has shown that these waves vary during sleep, consciousness, conscious-ness, mental activity, under the influence in-fluence of anesthetics or sedative drugs, and in certain diseases. Though the waves are different under un-der differing conditions, they are always present, showing that the human brain like the human heart is continually active. Study of the currents from the brain will, it is hoped, givo valuable information about , various mental disorders, much as similar studies of the currents from the heart tell certain important things about the condition of that organ. But apparently ap-parently they will not shed much light on the question of what makes life. No answer can be given, Professor Profes-sor Berger says, to the question of whether the electric tension that is seen in the main vibrations of the "brain waves" merely accompanies the vital processes or whether it does just the work necessary to produce consciousness. |
