ABSTRACT
Between Hans Berger’s first publication in 1929 and the first review articles in 1937–1938, electroencephalography went through a phase of largely explorative experimentation, in which no uniform procedure had yet been established, the individual analyses were instructed by very different theoretical constructs, and also in technical respects most laboratories were experimenting with apparatus that had been developed ad hoc. In the various laboratories that took up investigations on electric potentials in the brain, although those tests had been triggered by a knowledge of Berger’s research, they remain guided by theoretical presuppositions and established experimental arrangements from other contexts. At each of these places, the electroencephalogram (EEG) experiments were fitted inside a microcosm that in each case endowed the knowledge space of the EEG with specific contours. This is where the EEG was fashioned into the scientific object that only became known through this process.
