1958 – 1963

Real Science and Brain Waves

by Thomy Nilsson

Real Science and Brain Waves: Two RPI firsts for me Thomy Nilsson (B.Sc., ’62 ½) Professor Emeritus, University of Prince Edward Island At 8:00 AM one Monday in September 1961 I attended my first upper level Psychology course - Dr. Gillray Kandel’s 63.28 The Psychology of Sensation and Perception’s lab. Several of us students gathered in a large room with six telephone booths. By each booth was a table with various mechanical, electronic and optical assemblies. Puzzled, I went over to one with some lenses, a prism, a diffraction grating and a light source. As Dr. Kandel came in, he told us to pick a table and he would come around and talk to us. When he came to our table, he asked, if we had figured out the apparatus. It is some kind of monochromator that projects a colored beam into the booth, I replied. Then added that it would work better if we had a — and moved –. Well, he replied, see what you can do with it as is. So we asked for the instructions. Oh, there are no particular instructions. Look at the section on color vision in chaptter 13 and think of something you would like to measure. Then go to chapter 8 and choose a method to use. You mean we can do anything we want with it? Wow! What a difference from previous chemistry and physics labs where we had to follow a set of step by step instructions and if at step 16 you did not get 7.34, repeat steps 11 to 16. This was real science, and I never looked back. Weeks later Dr. Kandel brought out a 1930's single channel Grass Instruments Model 1, battery powered electroencephalograph. When he showed us the electrical activity of our brain in response to a flashing light, I knew what I wanted to do. Having learned that the brain’s Alpha rhythm would follow the frequency of a light flashing between 8 and 20 Hz, I wondered if the change in alpha occurred before or after we saw a change in how fast the light was flashing. This Honors Thesis became the beginning of a quest to learn how the brain produced consciousness. On completing my B.SC. in Psychology, Dr. Kandel recommended me for a research assistantship with Dr. Mitchell Kietzman at Columbia University. There I ran more experiments on flashing lights and got involved in an EEG experiment that led to discovering that the P300 brain wave component reflected response to a novel stimulus. Wanting to do research on my own, I entered a graduate studies at the University of Alberta. There I proposed to Dr. Thomas Nelson a masters thesis that involved seeking whether the visual response to flashing lights interacted with a theoretical central scanning process. The department did not have the precision timers or optical apparatus needed. However, based on my RPI machine shop, electronics and optical labs, I convinced him to buy the components and let me build the equipment. That lab was the basis of several more experiments on the color of light pulses, visual temporal frequency tuning, and quantitative measurements of visual memory.