In 1924, a German psychiatrist working in Jena succeeded in recording electrical activity from the human brain. His name was Hans Berger.
The achievement is often summarised in a single line — ‘Berger invented the EEG’ — but the real history is more complicated. Electrical activity had already been demonstrated in animal brains. Other researchers had developed increasingly sensitive instruments. Berger himself spent years struggling with weak signals, electrical interference, equipment limitations and scientific scepticism before he was confident enough to publish.
His 1929 paper, Über das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen (‘On the Human Electroencephalogram’), introduced the term electroencephalogram and opened a new era in clinical neurophysiology. But recognition did not come immediately. For several years, many scientists doubted that the signals were genuinely cerebral.
This page focuses on Berger’s contribution to the first human EEG recordings. The wider development of EEG in epilepsy, including epileptiform spikes, 3-Hz spike-and-wave and the rise of clinical EEG laboratories, is covered separately on this site.
Before Berger: the brain was already known to generate electricity
Berger was not the first person to discover electrical activity in the brain.
In the nineteenth century, investigators including Richard Caton in Britain recorded electrical changes from exposed animal brains. Adolf Beck in Kraków later studied spontaneous and stimulus-related cortical electrical activity, while other physiologists developed methods for recording from nervous tissue.
These experiments showed that the brain produced measurable electrical potentials, but they were largely confined to animals or exposed nervous tissue.
The challenge Berger faced was different: could the extremely weak electrical activity of a living human brain be recorded reliably through the tissues surrounding it?
Hans Berger: psychiatrist, not electrical engineer
Hans Berger was born in 1873 and trained in medicine and psychiatry. He spent much of his career at the University of Jena.
His interest in brain electricity was linked to a much broader question: whether mental processes had measurable physical correlates.
Berger was fascinated by the relationship between brain function, consciousness and what he sometimes described in terms of ‘psychic energy’. His motivations were therefore wider than epilepsy diagnosis.
He wanted a method that could record the functioning human brain directly.
The technical problem was enormous
Electrical signals generated by the brain are tiny.
In Berger’s era, amplification technology was still developing, and biological electrical recordings were easily contaminated by muscle activity, eye movements, mains interference and instrument noise.
Early recorders such as string galvanometers had been designed for larger electrical signals, including those from the heart.
Berger had to adapt available technology, improve sensitivity and learn which waveforms were reproducible.
That process took years.
6 July 1924
Historical reviews generally identify 6 July 1924 as the date of Berger’s first successful human brain electrical recording.
The recording was obtained in Jena from a young neurosurgical patient with a skull defect during an operation. The procedure gave Berger a much easier electrical pathway than an intact skull would have provided.
These earliest recordings were therefore not yet the routine non-invasive scalp EEG familiar today.
They were the first step in proving that human cerebral electrical activity could be recorded at all.
From skull defects to intact scalp recordings
After those early studies, Berger continued refining his technique.
He recorded from patients with skull defects and then moved toward recordings made through the intact skull and scalp using more sensitive equipment.
By the later 1920s, he was able to obtain reproducible rhythms from intact subjects.
This was the crucial transition from an experimental cerebral recording to what would become electroencephalography as a practical human technique.
Why Berger waited until 1929 to publish
Berger did not announce the result immediately.
He spent roughly five years repeating observations, changing recording arrangements and trying to determine whether the signals were genuine cerebral activity rather than technical artefact.
That caution is understandable. A false claim would have been easy to make because electrical contamination was such a serious problem.
His first major publication finally appeared in 1929.
‘Über das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen’
Berger’s 1929 paper introduced the word Elektrenkephalogramm, from which the abbreviation EEG ultimately derives.
He described rhythmic electrical activity from the human brain and reported changes under different physiological conditions.
The publication is generally treated as the formal birth of human electroencephalography, even though the first successful recordings had been made several years earlier.
The alpha rhythm
One of Berger’s most important observations was a prominent rhythmic activity around 10 cycles per second in relaxed wakefulness, especially when the eyes were closed.
He called this the alpha rhythm.
When the eyes opened or attention increased, the rhythm could diminish or disappear — a phenomenon later described as alpha blocking.
This gave Berger strong evidence that the recorded signal changed systematically with brain state rather than behaving like random electrical noise.
The beta rhythm
Berger also described lower-amplitude, faster activity, which he labelled beta activity.
The terms alpha and beta remain part of EEG vocabulary today, although modern frequency bands and interpretation are much more precisely defined.
Historically, these observations were crucial because they showed that the human EEG contained reproducible patterns rather than a single undifferentiated waveform.
Sleep, attention and anaesthesia
Berger investigated how brain rhythms changed during sleep, attention and narcosis.
His early series of papers between 1929 and 1933 described several changes that later became central to clinical EEG interpretation.
This work helped establish the idea that EEG was not merely a detector of disease. It could also reveal normal changes in brain state.
Why the scientific community was sceptical
Berger’s findings were initially received with considerable scepticism.
Many physiologists were unconvinced that such small signals could be recorded reliably through the skull and scalp.
Some suspected muscle activity, eye movement or instrumental artefact.
Berger’s relative isolation in Jena and the unusual nature of his claims also slowed acceptance.
For several years, his publications attracted less attention than their later importance would suggest.
1934: Adrian and Matthews confirm Berger
The turning point came in 1934.
British physiologist Edgar Adrian, already a Nobel laureate for work on nerve function, and his colleague B. H. C. Matthews independently reproduced Berger’s human EEG findings.
Adrian publicly demonstrated the alpha rhythm and confirmed that the signal was genuine cerebral activity.
That external validation transformed Berger’s work from a disputed curiosity into a credible new method.
Recognition spread rapidly after confirmation
Once Berger’s observations were independently verified, research accelerated.
Laboratories in Britain and the United States began exploring the technique. Hallowell Davis, Herbert Jasper, Frederic and Erna Gibbs, William Lennox and others soon investigated EEG patterns in epilepsy and other neurological conditions.
Within only a few years, the technique moved from an obscure research experiment toward clinical neurophysiology.
Berger recorded epilepsy-related abnormalities — but hesitated
Berger’s relationship to epilepsy is especially interesting.
He recorded abnormal EEG activity in people with epilepsy, including recordings from petit-mal attacks, but he was cautious about publishing some of the most striking traces because he suspected they might be artefacts caused by blinking or facial movement.
Historical review of Berger’s archive shows that he had obtained examples of epileptic EEG abnormalities by 1930–1931. Some were not published until later.
This caution meant that other groups would become more closely associated with the discovery of epileptiform spikes and characteristic spike-and-wave patterns.
Berger did not discover the epileptiform spike
This distinction is important.
Berger pioneered human EEG, but the development of EEG as a diagnostic tool for epilepsy involved other investigators.
In the mid-1930s, groups including Frederic and Erna Gibbs, William Lennox, Hallowell Davis, Herbert Jasper and others demonstrated specific epileptiform patterns and linked them with clinical seizure types.
That work belongs to the next phase of EEG history and will be covered separately in the page on the discovery of the epileptiform spike.
Why Berger’s caution mattered
It would be easy to describe Berger as having ‘missed’ discoveries because he failed to publish every abnormal trace immediately.
That interpretation is unfairly simple.
Early EEG was technically fragile. Eye movements and facial muscle activity could generate electrical signals far larger than cerebral rhythms.
Berger knew that artefact was a serious problem.
His hesitation shows how difficult it was to establish a completely new recording method when there were few accepted standards for deciding what was real.
The equipment shaped what could be seen
Early EEG was constrained by the technology used to amplify and record signals.
String galvanometers, photographic recording systems and later vacuum-tube amplifiers all influenced sensitivity, frequency response and noise.
The development of better amplifiers was therefore just as important as the conceptual discovery itself.
Human EEG became practical only because physiology and electrical engineering advanced together.
EEG was not originally an epilepsy test
Today, EEG is strongly associated with epilepsy, but Berger’s original programme was broader.
He investigated normal rhythms, consciousness, sleep, attention, anaesthesia and cerebral disease.
Epilepsy became one of the most important clinical applications only after characteristic abnormal patterns were recognised.
This historical sequence matters because it prevents the mistaken idea that EEG was invented specifically to diagnose seizures.
From ‘brain writing’ to clinical neurophysiology
The word electroencephalogram literally refers to a written or recorded representation of electrical brain activity.
Berger had created a method for turning invisible physiological activity into a visible trace.
That change was profound.
For the first time, clinicians could repeatedly observe aspects of human brain function without surgery.
What Berger’s EEG could not do
The earliest EEG did not show where every seizure began with modern precision.
It did not reveal structural lesions.
It could not diagnose every person with epilepsy.
It did not directly record individual neurons.
And a normal recording did not prove that a person did not have seizures.
Those limitations became clearer as clinical EEG developed.
Berger’s achievement was not that he solved epilepsy diagnosis. It was that he made human cerebral electrical activity measurable.
Berger’s place in the history of epilepsy
Before EEG, seizure classification depended almost entirely on observed behaviour, patient history and post-mortem anatomy.
After EEG, epilepsy could also be studied through electrical patterns recorded during and between attacks.
That did not replace clinical observation. It added an entirely new type of evidence.
The change would eventually help distinguish seizure syndromes, localise epileptic activity, support diagnosis and guide treatment.
Berger’s later career
Berger continued publishing EEG research through the 1930s.
His later years were difficult. He retired from his university position in the late 1930s, and the political environment of Nazi Germany formed the background to the final period of his career.
Historical accounts of Berger’s relationship to the Nazi state require nuance and are separate from the scientific importance of his EEG work. He was not simply an apolitical outsider to the institutions of his time, and modern historical scholarship has examined the complexities of German academic medicine during that period.
Berger died in 1941.
Why his contribution was recognised only slowly
Scientific discoveries are often remembered as single moments, but acceptance usually depends on replication.
Berger had the recording in 1924.
He published in 1929.
Independent confirmation arrived in 1934.
Only then did widespread scientific adoption begin.
The ten-year gap between first recording and broad recognition is part of the story, not a footnote.
A discovery built on earlier work
Berger’s achievement did not appear from nowhere.
Caton’s animal recordings, Beck’s cortical physiology, Pravdich-Neminsky’s animal electroencephalographic work, developments in galvanometers and advances in electrical amplification all made human EEG possible.
Berger’s distinctive contribution was to bring those strands together and persist until reliable human recordings were achieved.
The central historical lesson
The first human EEG was not a sudden flash of invention.
It was the result of decades of animal electrophysiology, improving instruments, repeated failed recordings and one researcher’s persistence.
Hans Berger’s 1924 recordings and 1929 publication established that the living human brain produced electrical rhythms that could be measured from outside it.
That single methodological breakthrough changed neurology.
Epilepsy would become one of its most important applications, but the EEG story had only just begun.
Sources and further reading
Stone JL, Hughes JR. Early history of electroencephalography and establishment of clinical neurophysiology. Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology. 2013.
Jung R, Berger W. Fiftieth anniversary of Hans Berger’s publication of the electroencephalogram: his first records, 1924–1931. 1979.
1924–2024: First centennial of EEG. Clinical Neurophysiology. 2025.
Karbowski K. Sixty years of clinical electroencephalography. European Neurology. 1990.
Coenen AML et al. Adolf Beck: a pioneer in electroencephalography between Richard Caton and Hans Berger. 2014.
American Epilepsy Society. A Brief History of EEG. In: Electroencephalography: An Introductory Text and Atlas. 2016.
Hans Berger (1873–1941) — the history of electroencephalography. Historical review.
Historical evidence checked: September 2026.