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W. Grey Walter February 19 1910 - May 6 1977 was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1910. His parents were originally German/British, from the father side, and American/British, from the mother side. He was brought to England in 1915, and educated at Westminster School and afterwards in King's College, Cambridge, in 1931. He failed to obtain a research fellowship in Cambridge and so turned to doing basic and applied neurophysiological research in hospitals, in London, from 1935 to 1939 and then at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, from 1939 to 1970. He also carried out research work in the United States, in the Soviet Union and in various other places in Europe. He married twice, and had two sons from the first and one from the second. According to his eldest son, Nicolas Walter, "he was politically on the left, a communist fellow-traveller before the Second World War and an anarchist sympathiser after it." Throughout his life he was a pioneer in the field of cyberneticsCybernetics is a theory of the communication and control of regulatory feedback. The term cybernetics stems from the Greek (meaning steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder). Cybernetics is the discipline that studies communication and control in living bein. In 1970Events January events January 1 Construction begins on Arcosanti, by Paolo Soleri, in Mayer, Arizona, located 65, miles north of Phoenix, Arizona. January 1 Unix epoch at 00:00:00 UTC. January 12 Biafra capitulates, ending the Nigerian civil war. January he was in a severe automobile accident and died seven years later on May 6 1977 without fully recovering.
As a young man Walter was greatly influenced by the work of the famous Russian physiologist Ivan PavlovIvan Petrovich Pavlov ( September 14 1849 February 27 1936) was a Russian physiologist who first described the phenomenon now known as conditioning in experiments with dogs. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904. Pavlov was inve. He visited the lab of Hans BergerHans Berger was born in May 21, 1873, in Neuses near Coburg, Thuringia, Germany. He studied medicine at the University of Jena, receiving his doctorate in 1897. In 1900 he was hired as an assistant to Otto Ludwig Binswanger (1852-1929), chairman of the Un, who invented the electroencephalograph, or EEG machine, for measuring electrical activity in the brain. Walter produced his own versions of Berger's machine with improved capabilities which allowed it to detect a variety of brain wave types ranging from the high speed alpha wave s to the slow delta wave s observed during sleep.
In the 1930s Walter made a number of discoveries using his EEG machines at Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol. He was the first to correcly locate the source of alpha wave s by triangulation within the occipital lobe of the brain and demonstrated the use of delta wave s to locate brain tumours or lesions responsible for epilepsy. He developed the first brain topography machine based on EEG, using on an array of spiral-scan CRTs connected to high-gain amplifiers.
During the Second World War he worked on scanning radar technology and guided missiles , which may have influenced his subsequent alpha wave scanning hypothesis of brain activity.
In the 1960s Walter also went on to discover the contingent negative variation (CNV) effect (or readiness potential ) whereby a negative spike of electrical activity appears in the brain half a second prior to a person being consciously aware of movements which they are about to make. Intriguingly, this effect brings into question the very notion of consciousness or free will, and should be considered as part of a person's overall reaction time to events.
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