What we of the street call "brain wave" recording and what the specialist; more grandly call electroencephalography has taken its place in medicine. There must be forty hospitals and universities in the United States where brain-wave recorders are now used to detect masked epilepsy, brain tumors and the like, with the result that doctors and surgeons are better able to handle brain disturbances than ever before, observes the New York "Times."
What this new branch of medicine needs is a book in which the whole art of brain-wave recording is set forth, with pictures of the waves that are typical of specific conditions. Such a book, a monumental work, has been prepared by Drs. Frederic A. and Erna L. Gibbs of Har-yard, "in the hope that it will help the reader to see at a glance what it has taken others many hours to find, that it will help to train his eye so that he can arrive at diagnoses from subjective criteria."
Theories of the brain's mode of action which were long accepted as certainties have turned out to be so much poetry. Whole chapters in standard textbooks on psychology, physiology and neurology must be discarded. The startling discovery that the brain beats electrically, beats tirelessly, beats so long as we live and that its electrical beats are utterly different when it is healthy and when it is injured or diseased engenders the hope that many an alffiction that sends its victim to the insane asylum or ends in, death may be detected and successfully treated long before it becomes outwardly manifest.
This new branch of medical science owes much to Prof. Hans Berger of Jena. It was he who discovered in the maze of the brain's electrical rhythms one that seemed fundamental. "Alpha" he called it. In most people it manifests itself on paper as a series of waves that come out at the rate of about ten each second. We may liken this rhythm to that of the heart. "When were run, the heart beats more rapidly than when we sit at our desks. And so with engine that is running with the least expendi-lure of energy. Open your eyes and give the brain work to do and the alphas are lost. What Berger calls "beta" waves then appear, which have a rate of about 25 a second. There are also deltas. On the whole the alphas are the telltale waves.
An expert has only to look at a record to detect rhythms that are either normal or abnormal in frequency, Children, sleeping persons, deteriorated epileptics and patients in flaccid stupor have records that are slow compared with the standard. Fright, epileptic seizures, intoxication, drugs are associated with abnormally fast brain activity (actually activity of the cortex, or "bark," of the brain).
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.