“The wondrous eyes of a new technology”—a history of the early electroencephalography (EEG) of psychopathy, delinquency, and immorality

Abstract

This article presents a history of the early electroencephalography (EEG) of psychopathy, delinquency, and immorality in Great Britain and the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Then, EEG was a novel research tool that promised ground-breaking insights in psychiatry and criminology. Experts explored its potential regarding the diagnosis, classification, etiology, and treatment of unethical and unlawful persons. This line of research yielded tentative and inconsistent findings, which the experts attributed to methodological and theoretical shortcomings. Accordingly, the scientific community discussed the reliability, validity, and utility of EEG, and launched initiatives to calibrate and standardize the novel tool. The analysis shows that knowledge production, gauging of the research tool, and attempts to establish credibility for EEG in the study of immoral persons occurred simultaneously. The paper concludes with a reflection on the similarities between EEG and neuroimaging—the prime research tool in the current neuroscience of morality—and calls for a critical assessment of their potentials and limitations in the study of immorality and crime.

Digitising psychiatry? Sociotechnical expectations, performative nominalism and biomedical virtue in (digital) psychiatric praxis

“…These often emerged from within allied disciplines such as neurology (e.g. EEG; Schirmann ), physiology (e.g. PET; Dumit ) and nuclear medicine (e.g.…”

Meanings of Waves: Electroencephalography and Society in Mexico City, 1940–1950

“…Obviously, the quantitative analysis of electroencephalographic registers was usually applied only to groups that presented a well-defined neurological pathology as is the case of epilepsy, which gave way to ontologies and constructions, such as the “epileptic brain.” This technique was also utilized with social groups, such as criminals and homosexuals – i.e., social groups defined by their alleged anti-social and already pathologized behavior and personality – with completely disparate results 12 . The characterization of these groups did not require resorting to etiological explanations (Schirmann 2014, 4). But the question of the genetic basis of EEG and how this could justify the characterization of an entire ethnic group had not been widely studied, and it remained a controversial issue.…”

“…Later on, Grey Walter would realize that the assumed individuality of alpha rhythms and their connection to subjective experience by a specific type of visual imagery processing (Walter 1959, 287), along with the reification of the resulting typology, its possible genetic determination, and the interactions between individuals (affinity or antagonism, and ultimately sexual selection) with their impact in the shaping of social relationships –which turned the brain into “the social organ” – demanded “correlating cultural, genetic and cerebral with ethnic origins” (Walter 1968, 185; see also Schirmann 2014).…”

How Empathy Became a Brain Function

“…Its original French, German, and British precursors since the early 19 th century alternatively referred to antisocial behavior with intact intellectual capacities or various kinds of abnormal personalities (Müller 2010;Schirmann 2014;Stompe 2009). While the latter meaning has been taken over by the concept of personality disorder in clinical and scientific language, 'psychopathy' is still being used in that original sense vernacularly 5 .…”