Chapter 6
RESTLESS ENERGY
He was interrupted by the entrance of a tall and well-rounded blonde of highly unscientific appearance.
—WR, from Brain Waves and Death
ANY visitor to Tower House in the mid-1930s eventually had to submit to the ritual known as “putting on the electrodes,” which was part of the preparation for the measurement of brain waves, the research that would consume Loomis for the next few years. Guests who thought they were being taken on a guided tour of the laboratory would suddenly find themselves being eased into a chair as Loomis cheerfully talked them into undergoing a few harmless tests. Eminent biologists, chemists, physicists, psychiatrists, and neurologists, along with their wives and any other houseguests who happened to be stopping overnight in Tuxedo, were all recruited as volunteers for his experiments.
The preparation itself was not so much painful as disconcerting. It consisted of snipping a few hairs at various places on the scalp, rubbing the exposed skin with ointment to facilitate electrical contact, and attaching small silver disks called electrodes. One electrode was placed high on the forehead, one on the crown, and the third on the occiput, or back of the skull, so the action of the front part of the brain could be registered separately from that of the rear. (After many complaints about the lab’s amateur barbers, Loomis and his colleagues found they could “obtain satisfactory electrical and mechanical contact with the scalp without even cutting a hair.”) Either way, the result looked quite frightful, with the flexible wires previously soldered to the electrodes hanging Medusa-like from the subject’s head so they could later be plugged into connections to the measuring apparatus in the control room.
Loomis would then briskly march his victim to one of the downstairs laboratories, which had been converted into a “sleeping room,” where they would be asked to take a supervised nap. Richards, who collaborated with Loomis on this project as on others, wrote about the experiments in great detail in his novel, Brain Waves and Death. In an author’s note in the front of the book, he explained that electroencephalography was established as a science in 1933 and asserted that the science part of his fiction was wholly accurate. “Far from having no resemblance to anything whatsoever, the facts here given about it represent our present knowledge of the subject, and are false in so far as that knowledge is incomplete.” What follows is his description of the “sleeping room” at Tower House, which corresponds to the more clinical account featured in Loomis’ paper “Electrical Potentials of the Human Brain,” published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology:
It was a cheerful, undistinguished little place, much like hundreds of others in country houses up and down the East Coast. Care had been taken to conceal as much as possible that it was part of a scientific laboratory, for nervous people do not like to be surrounded by electrical instruments. It contained, besides the couch on which the body rested, a comfortable chair, a built-in wardrobe cabinet of modern design, and a large bed with small tables at each side of its head. On the wall were a couple of sporting prints and the curtains framing the shuttered window were gay. Only a sort of gigantic wall-plug above the head of the bed, and three search lights set in the ceiling, were at all unusual. . . .
The searchlights were a source of infrared light. A camera was discreetly mounted in the wardrobe to provide a photographic record and document changes of position. As the rooms were darkened while the subject was sleeping, Loomis used cameras with the fastest lenses then available and a new type of infrared film that the Eastman-Kodak Company made up for him specially and reportedly had flown to Tuxedo Park from Rochester on dry ice when he was doing experiments. The laboratory was equipped with two professional-quality darkrooms where the film was developed.
The wires from the subject’s head were plugged into the wall socket above the bed. The sleeping room was in the far corner of the laboratory, secluded from everything, and soundproofed with copper netting to eliminate any interfering electrical noise. A microphone near the bed was connected to the second so-called amplifier room, which contained the high-fidelity amplifiers Loomis used to magnify the minute electric impulses given off by the brain, making them much stronger, in the same way radio signals are amplified in a receiver. According to Richards, it was packed with black metal filing cabinets filled with radio tubes and meters and “resembled an overgrown radio transmitting station.” The amplifiers were also used in recording heart rate, bed movement, respiration, and sound communication between the sleeping room and the third, or control, room sixty-six feet away.
In the control room, a loudspeaker that was connected to the microphone in the sleeping room picked up even the slightest noise or sigh the subject might make. When they turned it up, the rustle of a sheet sounded “like a forest fire.” Loomis used three amplifiers, so that signals from each part of the head could be recorded simultaneously. Each amplifier was attached to an electronic pen of silver tubing, which recorded the impulses or brain waves on a continuous ribbon of paper on a huge revolving drum. One pen wrote in red and the other two in blue ink. The forty-five-inch round drum, eight feet long, spun around once every minute, each second of “brain current” leaving a wave three-fourths of an inch long. Seven hours’ sleep stretched out to a wave line 1,575 feet long. There was also an oscillator for sending tones of various frequencies to stimulate the subject in the sleeping room. Garret Hobart, who was an amateur radio enthusiast, manned the control room and kept Loomis’ complicated custom-rigged apparatus running smoothly. As all three rooms were soundproofed, making communication between them difficult, Loomis installed an elaborate intercom system like that used in many law offices at the time. Thus his various itinerant experimenters, who generally included Richards, Hobart, and Loomis’ longtime collaborator E. Newton Harvey and his wife, Edith, could monitor the experiment no matter where they happened to be. For the most part, however, they just shouted back and forth.
Loomis and his co-workers found that when the subject was awake, the pens would draw little trains of perfectly symmetrical waves, but as he fell asleep, there would be bursts of faster waves interspersed with little activity, when the pens would move sluggishly, dragging jagged spikes. As the subject fell into a deep sleep, the waves became larger and appeared more frequently. The ink tracing made on the paper was known informally as an “afternoon sleep record,” because the experiments were routinely performed during an after-lunch siesta (though as their studies progressed, they began monitoring their subjects during a whole night’s sleep). Loomis’ earliest subjects included many family members. The Thornes, both their boys, and all three of Loomis’ sons heroically endured being wired to the complicated apparatus for hours at a time so that precise electrical measurements of their brain waves could be made while they were sleeping. Afterward they were rewarded with much laughter and teasing about the gargantuan loudness of their snoring. “Aunt Julia said Alfred was always sticking those things to her scalp, and apparently it itched terribly,” recalled Paulie Loomis. “She loved her brother and would do anything to make him happy. She would sit there for hours while he did experiments on her.”
Loomis had first become interested in the new discovery of brain waves in the early 1930s after reading about the work of Hans Berger, a German psychiatrist. Berger had published his observations of the rhythmic electrical output of the human brain in 1929, but American physiologists had been unable to duplicate his results, and many were inclined to doubt the existence of the low-voltage signals he described. Loomis was intrigued and wanted to see if he could replicate Berger’s observations using an electronic apparatus of his own design. In June 1935, in the first in a series of pioneering studies of brain waves, Loomis excitedly reported his findings in the weekly journal Science:
Recent interest in brain potentials has induced us to put on record the results of experiments carried out in the Loomis Laboratory, Tuxedo Park, in which the new phenomenon in this fascinating field has appeared most clearly—namely, the very
definite occurrence of trains of rhythmic potential changes as a result of sounds heard by a human subject during sleep. . . .
Loomis, working with Hobart and Harvey, continued to investigate different aspects of these “trains” of waves, also known as Berger rhythms, which appeared in most adults and were regular rhythms with definite frequencies, usually between nine and eleven cycles per second. A few months later, Loomis reported the preliminary results of experiments performed on eleven human subjects ranging in age from five to forty-eight years old. They had identified four clearly defined states of sleep, or “levels of consciousness,” occurring in the human brain, which produced different wave patterns, that they named according to their appearance, “spindles, trains, saw toothed, and random.” (He later amended this finding to include five “levels of consciousness.”) The brain wave patterns during sleep were so characteristic, Loomis reported, they could be used as a criterion to determine the subject’s state or depth of sleep. The waves changed shape when a drowsing subject was roused, spoken to, or became restless. “In animals (dogs, rats) types of waves appeared quite different from any observed in human subjects.” Deep anesthesia stopped the waves in a rat completely, and they did not start up again until the anesthesia began to wear off.
Loomis proceeded to investigate the pattern of brain waves of hypnotized subjects. He had been fascinated by the art and science of hypnotism since he was a boy and had first seen magicians achieve the strange transformation with the swinging action of a pocket watch. He had kept up a lively interest in the subject, and this gave him a chance to gain firsthand experience. For this series of experiments, Loomis recruited David Slight, a doctor from McGill University in Montreal who specialized in hypnosis. Slight brought with him as his “subject” a ship’s carpenter, who was forty-four years old and had been hypnotized many times. He was first tested awake and then asleep and showed characteristically normal trains of waves. Loomis described the surprising results in Science:
After Dr. Slight had induced the hypnotic state, a sustained condition of cataleptic rigidity ensued. Nevertheless, the trains characteristic of a person awake remained at all times during hypnosis and no spindles or random waves (characteristic of normal sleep) appeared during any of the tests.
Although he was thoroughly hypnotized, his brain waves were just like those of a normal waking person. No wave of the kind associated with sleep was elicited. Loomis concluded, “It would seem that the term hypnotic ‘sleep’ is not a correct one for the hypnotic state, at least not measured by this criterion.”
Loomis wanted to see if the hypnotized person was subject to suggestion. He designed an experiment that would prove if it was possible to produce and record temporary blindness induced by hypnotic suggestion. The subject’s eyelids were fastened open with adhesive tape and he was hypnotized, lying rigidly on the bed and staring fixedly. After giving the subject careful instructions, Dr. Slight suggested alternately, “You can see,” and fifteen seconds later, “You cannot see—you are blind.” This procedure was repeated “a large number of times,” according to Loomis, and “in every case trains appeared when the suggestion was made that he was blind, and in every case they ceased when the suggestion was made that he could see. This was true both when there was a light in the room and when the room was in total darkness.” This enabled them to establish that temporary blindness could be produced by hypnotic suggestion.
In a subsequent experiment, Loomis tested for the effects of emotional disturbance, such as embarrassment or apprehension. His youngest son, Henry, who was sixteen years old at the time, proved to be a particularly good subject for hypnotic suggestion. He recalled that for one experiment, he went to the sleeping chamber and immediately dozed off. His father then whispered in his ear, through a tube, that the Lands’ End, the forty-foot sailboat he and his brother Lee had built, “was on fire.” Henry remembered that he “jumped up” and then “started to climb the companionway ladder—but, of course, there was no ladder.” He was still sound asleep, but the very suggestion that his boat was in danger stopped the normal brain rhythms. The experiment showed that while purely mental or intellectual activity had no effect on brain rhythms, emotional disturbance profoundly altered the wave trains. Loomis was so pleased with the result, he used it as an example in his paper on the subject, though Henry is identified in the paper only as the teenage subject H.L.
To relieve the tedium associated with the afternoon and nighttime sleep records, which required hours of monitoring the electric pens as they drew waves on the continuous paper, the experimenters resorted to all kinds of practical jokes and schoolboy pranks. One of the principal mischief makers was Richards, who, according to Hobart, had “a great sense of humor and was always pulling some sort of gag on someone.” Richards used to complain that Loomis’ EEG apparatus was alarmingly similar to the “technique of electrocution” employed at Sing Sing and always claimed he had to have a drink or two to alleviate both the anxiety and the boredom the contraption inspired. The latter was evidenced by at least one of Loomis’ experimental results on the brain waves on an unidentified subject during “an alcoholic stupor.” The subject had “consumed 500cc. of gin (212 cc. pure alcohol) within 30 minutes,” Loomis wrote, and “showed a marked large alpha rhythm with secondary potentials on the regular rhythm quite different from the rhythm which had appeared before the alcohol was taken. At this stage the frequency of the alpha rhythm was very definitely slower . . . the marked alpha rhythm only began to disappear when the subject had been deeply asleep for one half hour.” Loomis concluded, “Alcoholic stupor like hypnosis does not exhibit the characteristic of sleep.”
The local papers gleefully lampooned what they regarded as Loomis’ strangest obsession yet. “Now picture the latest experiments at the laboratory,” reported the New York Evening Journal on March 6, 1936. “Dr. Slight does a Svengali. His subject loses sensation and will power. His muscles become rigid. He’s hypnotized. But his ‘brain electricity,’ tapped again, fails to register the rhythm of sleep. . . .” Thanks to Loomis, it had been proven once and for all that “the hypnotist’s ‘hocus pocus abracadabra’ doesn’t really put a person to sleep.”
While Loomis’ brain wave experiments were made light of in the popular press, his research was being taken very seriously in academic journals. His electroencephalograph was of a novel and highly efficient design, and his results were having a profound influence on the field, which was still in its infancy. Addressing a packed audience at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1937, Loomis revealed that his most recent experiments indicated that the human brain came equipped with an automatic “electric clock.” Loomis described the “time clock” as a “subconscious cyclic process of some sort going on in the brain, which is no doubt the basis of our perception of time intervals.” It was this subconscious rhythm, according to Loomis, that offered the first scientific explanation for an ancient puzzle: the ability of some individuals to wake from a sound sleep at a given hour, which they had fixed in their mind before retiring.
Loomis, along with Harvey and Hobart, made the discovery while studying the electrical brain waves “of a very sleepy yet conscientious person trying to obey instructions.” The subject was told to open his eyes when a tone was sounded in his ear and a light signal was flashed, then to close them again. The signal lasted five seconds and was repeated automatically every thirty seconds. Eventually the subject grew accustomed to the noise and fell asleep. But a flurry of anticipatory waves shot through his brain two and a half seconds before each sounding of the tone. Although asleep, the subject knew the tone was coming, which according to the experimenters was evidence that the human brain came equipped with its own automatic “electric clock.”
At the same time Loomis was doing his pioneering research in Tuxedo Park, Hallowell Davis, a professor at Harvard Medical School, was also conducting experiments with the electroencephalograph. In 1934, Davis had failed to detect the rhythmic e
lectrical output of the brain and had initially discounted Berger’s observation as an artifact. But when two of his students were testing his equipment on him, they observed Davis’ own unmistakable alpha rhythm. Davis was the first to replicate Berger’s findings west of the Atlantic. Only a few months later, Loomis successfully tapped the electrical output of the brain in a second set of experiments at his laboratory. Davis had immediately recognized the clinical potential of the electroencephalograph (EEG) and in collaboration with other researchers soon identified the characteristic wave pattern of petit mal epilepsy. After hearing about their research, Loomis invited Davis and his wife, Pauline, to Tuxedo Park and offered to fund further studies investigating the clinical applications of the EEG.
Between 1937 and 1939, Loomis, working together with the Davises, made major advances in relating EEG “disturbance patterns” to various “levels of consciousness”—from emotional tension and mental activity to relaxation and different stages of sleep. During these experiments, Pauline Davis was the first to observe cortical electrical responses to auditory, visual, and somatosensory stimuli in waking subjects. As Loomis was now devoting himself to scientific work full-time, his name appears as active collaborator in nearly a dozen papers on electroencephalography published by the laboratory in those years, and several of them were of great importance. In the end, Loomis’ experiments succeeded in validating Berger’s discovery, which became the basis of a new branch of study. He played a major role in the development of the electroencephalograph, which went on to become an extremely valuable diagnostic tool and is used routinely in hospitals to detect epilepsy as well as many other diseases.
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