In Boston last week, it finally happened: science set a machine to study a machine. The occasion: a meeting of the Eastern Association of Electroencephalographers (brainwave recorders).
In the famed Ether Dome of Massachusetts General Hospital, a blond British electroencephalographer named William Grey Walter unveiled his invention—a yellow box, resembling a deep-freeze unit, full of vacuum tubes, condensers, switches, wires. Walter applied to a patient's head the electrodes of an electroencephalograph (a machine that traces the peaks and valleys of the brain waves, helps to diagnose epilepsy, brain tumors, etc.). Then he attached...