The Birth of Information in the Brain

Edgar Adrian and the Vacuum Tube

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4516480
AutoresJustin Garson (0000-0002-0210-2989, City University of New York, autor correspondente)
Ano2015
Volume28
Fascículo1
Páginas31-52
Data de publicação2015-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoScience in Context (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0269-8897 • E-ISSN: 1474-0664
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0269889714000313
PMID25832569
OpenAlexW2096944395
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas5
Referências citadas59

ArgumentAs historian Henning Schmidgen notes, the scientific study of the nervous system would have been "unthinkable" without the industrialization of communication in the 1830s. Historians have investigated extensively the way nerve physiologists have borrowed concepts and tools from the field of communications, particularly regarding the nineteenth-century work of figures like Helmholtz and in the American Cold War Era. The following focuses specifically on the interwar research of the Cambridge physiologist Edgar Douglas Adrian, and on the technology that led to his Nobel-Prize-winning research, the thermionic vacuum tube. Many countries used the vacuum tube during the war for the purpose of amplifying and intercepting coded messages. These events provided a context for Adrian's evolving understanding of the nerve fiber in the 1920s. In particular, they provide the background for Adrian's transition around 1926 to describing the nerve impulse in terms of "information," "messages," "signals," or even "codes," and for translating the basic principles of the nerve, such as the all-or-none principle and adaptation, into such an "informational" context. The following also places Adrian's research in the broader context of the changing relationship between science and technology, and between physics and physiology, in the first few decades of the twentieth century

Argument (complex analysis · Cognitive science · Cold war · Context (archaeology · Electrical engineering · Epistemology · History of science · Political science · Scientific progress · Vacuum tube · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Engineering · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medicine · Neurology and Historical Studies · Philosophy · Psychology