New ways of understanding and recording electrical brain activity transformed science fiction. Discover how the invention of the electroencephalograph (EEG) changed popular understandings of the human brain, and how these new technologies were depicted in film and media.
What is the EEG?
The electroencephalograph (EEG) is a device that measures electrical activity in the brain.
By attaching small sensors to a person’s scalp, the EEG machine records the frequency and fluctuations of brain waves, producing a graph of the activity on paper. This record of brain activity, the electroencephalogram, can then be studied by a medical professional to diagnose and assess a number of neurological conditions or states.
The EEG has been used most to detect and measure epilepsy and seizures but has also been historically used to diagnose sleep disorders, amnesia, tumours, strokes, brain death, and so on.
Science Museum Group Collection
The EEG as film star
The electroencephalograph (EEG) has become a clichéd plot device in science fiction and horror movies to visualise something unexplained, even supernatural, going on in deep inside character’s brains.
Looking to an earlier example of the EEG in film, this story focuses on The Brain Machine (1955)—a title which refers to the device for reading brain activity, as well as alluding to the brain itself as a machine suspectable to malfunction. The EEG is the star of this British movie—which mixes elements of the crime thriller with science fact and fiction—expressing hope at the potential clinical and criminological uses of this futuristic device.
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EEG—Technology and technique
Animals had been used to research the electrical activity of the brain from the late-19th century, but the first human EEG recording was not made until 1924. This recording was taken by the inventor of electroencephalography (the technique) and the electroencephalograph (the technology), German physiologist and psychiatrist Hans Berger. Using the EEG, Berger was the first to describe the different waves or rhythms that present in a normal and abnormal brain, discovering alpha waves (also referred to as ‘Berger waves’) and beta waves.
Berger’s findings on electrical brain activity were verified in the early 1930s, and EEG came to global prominence over the decade. In 1936, the first EEG laboratory opened at Massachusetts General Hospital. Here and in a number of other medical settings in the late-1930s and 1940s, EEG technology was used in a variety of experimental and clinical applications.
In Brainwaves, a cultural history of the EEG, Cornelius Borck explains: "With the help of the EEG and the demonstration of electric brain activity, the brain started to be seen as an electric machine". The concept of the ‘electric brain’ was enhanced, both in the scientific and public imagination, by the development of the first computer at the end of the Second World War. The equivalence of computer (electric brain) and brain (electric machine) fed into the revolutionary mindset of cybernetics, the scientific study of how information is communicated in machines and in living things.
The electric brain and popular culture
The electroencephalograph, and the concept of the brain as an ‘electric machine’, were soon incorporated into science fiction and horror media. Both Edward Dmytryk’s 1941 film The Devil Commands and Curt Siodmak’s 1942 sci-fi novel Donovan’s Brain evolved the classic ‘mad scientist’ narrative to incorporate EEG technologies and brain wave research.
In the opening of Donovan’s Brain, Dr Patrick Cory knows his experiment to reanimate a monkey’s brain has worked when the "electro-encephalograms marked their slow, trembling curves on the paper strip which continuously flowed from the wave-record-machine". This popular novel was adapted by Hollywood as The Lady and the Monster (1944) and Donovan’s Brain (1943) and was republished as a sci-fi ‘classic’ (alongside HG Wells’ The Time Machine) in ‘Famous Fantastic Mysteries’ in 1950.
All-Fiction Field, Inc. / Norman Saunders, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Image source
for 1950s popular magazine with sensational cover illustration
Measuring brain waves in wartime and postwar Britain
In 1940s Britain, the field of electroencephalography developed in parallel with the USA, with British psychiatrists and neurophysiologists investigating the EEG’s application to a range of conditions. This included wartime research by Denis Hill at the Maudsley Hospital, investigating the brain activity of criminal psychopaths. He identified that the psychopaths had the persistent presence of the theta rhythm and interpreted this as a sign of anger and aggression.
Science Museum Group Collection
The key centre for studying brain activity in wartime and post-war Britain was the Burden Neurological Institute (BNI). The BNI, which was established in Bristol in 1939, was an independent research unit specialising in studying the human brain. It swiftly established a world-leading reputation, pioneering the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), prefrontal lobotomy and electroencephalography. It is in EEG research and, later, intersecting cybernetics research, that the BNI was most influential.
Reclaiming women's roles in EEG research
In reporting at the time as well as historical studies, the BNI is often presented as a ‘site of exclusively male expertise’, sometimes reduced to the work of renowned neurophysiologist William Grey Walter. However, as David Saunders explains in his SMG journal article, women played a vital role in the EEG research undertaken at the BNI—but this has been largely written out of its history.
A photographic collection within the BNI Papers at the Science Museum provides "a hidden history of women’s scientific achievement" at the institute, albeit one that is still framed in problematic ways. Women such as electroencephalographer Vivian Walter (née Dovey) and psychologist Janet Shipton (née Atlee) were central to the institute’s studies of brain wave activity, including pioneering work on epilepsy.
A number of photos in the collections show them operating the EEGs, though often framed in the context of their collaborative working relationship with their husbands—William Grey Walter and Shipton’s engineer husband Harold—who are often positioned more prominently and commandingly in the images.
In some staged publicity pictures, female researchers, including psychologist Shipton, stood in for patients. While these images documented their labour, the photos often reproduced the traditional gendered power relations of work and home, framing women’s contributions as "passive subjecthood, of wifely duty, of machine-like drudgery".
After the mid-1950s, women’s roles in the BNI became literally rather than just visually erased, with an increasing automation of women’s roles, including William Grey Walter replacing his now ex-wife Vivian with an automatic wave analyser that he named ANNIE.
British cinema and the brain machine
Ken Hughes’ 1955 British film The Brain Machine showcases the potential of the titular EEG as both a cutting-edge scientific technology and modern plot device, bringing innovative science fiction elements into the classic crime thriller formula.
Both trailer and poster foreground the wave form patterns created by the EEG pen recorder, linking the film’s innovation in synthesizing these genres with the EEG’s combined clinical and criminological potential in its tagline: "The waves of the brain machine spell … stop this killer!"
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In the film, psychiatrist Dr Phillipa Roberts (Elizabeth Allen) is an expert in studying and treating brain abnormalities with EEG technologies. As with the BNI’s Walters and Shiptons, this work is sometimes undertaken in collaboration with her husband, Dr Geoffrey Allen (Patrick Barr), from whom she is separating.
In The Brain Machine, Roberts and her husband use the EEG and its recordings to distinguish between aggressive behaviour caused by a brain tumour and a congenital brain disorder linked to (perhaps the cause of) psychopathy. The film, therefore, points to the research of the time that explored the EEG’s potential to identify psychopathic tendencies.
Melding science fiction and fact
The film’s opening titles adopt a modernist aesthetic and evocative score combining dramatic orchestral music and the otherworldly effect of the vibraphone, which was often used in science fiction film scores. The first onscreen image is the EEG pen recorder and printer on a black background, as the eerie twinkling of the vibraphone melds with the whirring of the machine, enhancing the sci-fi associations of both the film and the EEG.
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The camera zooms in to the writing unit, the machine is switched on, and we see and hear the paper start feeding through the printer as the wave form patterns are drawn. The title The Brain Machine is overlaid on the printout of the brain waves as the musical score gathers in intensity, foreshadowing the EEG’s dramatic revelations later in the film.
The narrative begins with a handcuffed prisoner, Jarrit, being transported to the ‘Regional Hospital for Mental Health’ where he will be examined by electroencephalographer Dr Roberts. She fits the electrodes to Jarrit, and takes an EEG recording, marking up the printout as it feeds through the machine, and then making interventions – using strobe lighting – to stimulate his brain activity.
The eerie sound of the vibraphone indicates that something ‘abnormal’ is being revealed. Although the procedure is curtailed, because the patient becomes unruly, there is enough in the recording of the wave patterns to diagnoses Jarrit as a "psychopath with homicidal tendencies".
Women's expertise in electroencephalography
Now working at a busy North London Hospital, Dr Roberts is presented with an aggressive patient suffering from amnesia. She examines the patient, named Frank Smith, and recommends an EEG. Another female electroencephalographer takes his ‘unusual’ recording, which, she suggests, might indicate a tumour.
Dr Roberts is not convinced by this diagnosis and, after examining the recording of Smith’s brain activity, recognises the similarity with the EEG she took earlier "from a man named Jarrit. A psychotic who killed four people".
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This first half of the film is interesting in how it genders electroencephalography as a female area of expertise—as male clinician Dr Roberts explains of the EEG recording: "these things are a bit out of my department; pretty though!" The women's work with the EEG is presented as offering greater insight and precision in clinical diagnosis and criminal profiling. The film makes this argument through a fetishisation of the intricate details of the recordings—using extreme close ups to trace and compare their peaks and troughs—and reproduces this aesthetic in its trailer and poster campaign.
However, like women’s labour at the BNI, Dr Roberts' role in the narrative changes in the second half from an active to passive one. Roberts is taken hostage by the troubled Smith, triggering a shift in the film to a more traditional crime narrative. This puts the onus on her doctor husband to use his expertise to track her down and save her. The film concludes with Smith’s arrest and the couples’ implied reconciliation, as Dr Allen places his arm around his wife and says "I'll take you home".
The EEG in recent film
The EEG has continued to feature as a prop in film and television, but its use has fluctuated in relation to the production and popularity of certain genres. In the 1980s, the resurgence of science fiction and horror brought the EEG back as a key story element in films such as E.T. (1982), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Firestarter (1984).
However, none of these films or any since have positioned a ‘brain machine’ as their star attraction.
Find out more
- Cornelius Borck, Brainwaves: A Cultural History of Electroencephalography, 2018
- Rhodri Hayward, ‘The tortoise and the love-machine: Grey Walter and the politics of electroencephalography’, Science in Context, 14 (4 ), 2001
- Denis Hill (1956) ‘Clinical Applications of EEG in Psychiatry’, Journal of Mental Science, 102(427), 1956
- David Saunders. ‘Wired-up in white organdie: framing women’s scientific labour at the Burden Neurological Institute’, Science Museum Group Journal, Autumn 2018, Issue 10
- Curt Siodmak, Donovan's Brain. Reprinted in Fantastic Mysteries, August 1950, 11(6).
This story was created by Demons of the Mind, an AHRC-funded project exploring the interactions of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychology) and cinema in the long 1960s.
