Instead of finding long-range signals, he invented EEG
A brush with death led Hans Berger to invent a machine that could eavesdrop on the brain.
In 1893, when he was 19, Berger fell off his horse during maneuvers training with the German military and was nearly trampled. On that same day, his sister, far away, got a bad feeling about Hans. She talked her father into sending a telegram asking if everything was all right.
To young Berger, this eerie timing was no coincidence: It was a case of “spontaneous telepathy,” he later wrote. Hans was convinced that he had transmitted his thoughts of mortal fear to his sister — somehow.
So he decided to study psychiatry, beginning a quest to uncover how thoughts could travel between people.Berger’s machine, first used successfully in 1924, produced a readout of squiggles that represented the electricity created by collections of firing nerve cells in the brain.
When Berger was young, the idea of paranormal psychic communication didn’t sound as wacko as it does now. “The hangover from the 19th century was this idea of trying to explain cases of telepathy,” says communications expert Caitlin Shure, who wrote her thesis at Columbia University on the concept of brain waves. At that time, scientific societies and serious research initiatives were devoted to probing these occurrences. British physician and author Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame, was a staunch believer. It was, as Shure puts it, “peak telepathy enthusiasm time.”
In a way, this makes sense. Scientific understanding of the world was deepening, along with technological advances in radio. “Why shouldn’t thoughts be able to travel through the universe just like wireless telegraphy?” Shure says.
Berger slogged away to prove how telepathy worked, trying to measure mental activity. He scrutinized blood flow and brain temperature before turning to electrical output. His breakthrough finally came on July 6, 1924, while studying a man with a skull injury called Patient K. Using a vacuum tube amplifier to enhance the electrical signals, Berger was finally able to spot a brain wave.
In 1929, Berger finally published his results, the first of a series of papers with the exact same title, numbered 1 to 14: “Über das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen,” or “On the Electroencephalogram of Man.”
