GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 40

Figure 3.2. Alpha rhythms in the brain, showing the effect of opening and closing
the eyes. Source: E. d. Adrian and B. H. C. matthews, “The Berger Rhythm: Potential
Changes from the Occipital lobes in man,” brain , 57 (1934), 355-85. (By permission
of Oxford university Press.)
of a cerebral tumor by EEG, the discovery that a significant proportion of
epileptics show unusual brainwaves even between fits, and intervention in a
famous murder case (Hayward 2001a, 620). 4 Following his pioneering work,
EEG was at the center of Walter's career for the rest of his life. In 1949 he was
a cofounder and coeditor of the felicitously titled journal Electroencephalogra-
phy and Clinical Neurophysiology (self-described on its title page as “The EEG
Journal”) and from 1953 to 1957 he was president of the International Federa-
tion of EEG Societies. 5
In 1939 Walter and Golla moved together to the newly established Burden
Neurological Institute near Bristol, with Golla as its first director and Walter
as director of its Physiology Department (at annual salaries of £1,500 and
£800, respectively). The Burden was a small, private institution devoted to
“clinical and experimental neuroscience” (Cooper and Bird 1989), and Walter
remained there for the rest of his working life, building a reputation as one
of the world's leaders in EEG research and later in research using electrodes
implanted in the brain (rather than attached to the scalp). 6 Walter's best-
recognized and most lasting contribution to brain science was his discovery
in the 1960s of contingent negative variation, the “expectancy wave,” a shift
in the electrical potential of the brain that precedes the performance of inten-
tional actions. He was awarded the degree of ScD by Cambridge in 1947 and
an honorary MD degree by the University of Aix-Marseilles in 1949.
Besides his technical work, in 1953 Walter published an influential popu-
lar topic on the brain, The Living Brain , with a second edition in 1961, and in
1956 he published a novel, Further Outlook , retitled The Curve of the Snowflake
in the United States. 7 He was married twice, from 1934 to 1947 to Katherine