Epileptic Brain Waves

Most persons have seen one or more of the estimated 500,000 epileptics in the U. S. throw a fit. The fit may be mild and quick--a momentary rigidity during which the epileptic grows pallid and drops whatever is in his hands. Or the fit may be a grand mal, the epileptic uttering a loud shout and dropping like a log to the ground, face pale, eyes rolling, hands clenched, legs spread stiffly. After a few seconds, the epileptic's face goes dusky. He begins to jerk his arms, legs and body, roll his head, clamp his jaws, drool foam. Such an attack may last two or three minutes, after which the epileptic grows limp, breathes with a heavy rasp, drops into deep unconsciousness.

Medicine has known about epilepsy from the time of the Babylonians. Julius Caesar suffered from it, as did Napoleon. Dostoevski, an epileptic, unraveled the epileptic's mind and life for literature. But, despite ancient recognition and voluminous analyses of symptoms. Medicine even today knows very little about the causes and treatment of epilepsy.

The brain is immediately involved in epilepsy. Suspected are spasms of blood vessels and brain tissue. Suspected are toxins and chemicals. Suspected are deformities and scars. Bromides serve as the commonest treatment for epilepsy.

The epileptic's skull is a firm barrier against studying his affliction. However, Drs. Hallowell Davis, 39, and Frederic Andrews Gibbs, 32, of Harvard have managed to detect intelligible electrical messages from the brains of epileptics through that barrier. Last week Drs. Davis & Gibbs went to Detroit to tell the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology how they received the epileptic messages and what they were.

Main reliance of the Davis-Gibbs work is the recently recognized fact that the brain pulsates. When it does so it produces a faint electric current which can be detected and registered on a chart by means of electrodes applied to ear and skull.

The brain of a normal person, relaxed and with eyes closed, beats eight to 20 times a second and produces ten to 50 millionths of a volt on each beat. On a chart those beats show up as a fast succession of small waves.

When a normal person becomes unconscious from breathing too much nitrogen, faints from low blood pressure, or simply goes to sleep, the fast small waves on the chart are replaced by large slow waves, one to five a second.

Just before an epileptic has a fit, a "larval explosion" of large surges occurs through his brain, three every second, producing 100 to 300 millionths of a volt each. The wave pattern is large, slow and evenly curved but cut by sharp downward strokes which perhaps reflect convulsions in the brain. During the depths of the epileptic fit, the characteristic long slow curves assume an unbroken S-shape.

By analyses of such charts, Drs. Davis & Gibbs told the experimental biologists in Detroit last week, "We hope to be able to locate the part of the brain in which these disturbances start. If the region should turn out to be one which is not really necessary to a person, then a brain surgeon might be able to remove it."

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