The Birth of Information in the Brain: Edgar Adrian and the Vacuum Tube

Abstract

As 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.

Consilience in the Peripheral Sensory Adaptation Response

“…The compilation of studies in this paper also documents the historical development of the sensory sciences which followed the changes in technology unfolding in the twentieth century. For example, the proprioceptive and touch senses were among the first to be investigated as they were the easiest to access and their spike activity slow enough so that reliable spike counts could be achieved even back in Adrian's time using vacuum tube amplifiers (Garson, 2015). With the advent of computers and greater access to more invasive regions, the study of hearing and vision with their higher firing rates soon became possible.…”

Codes, functions, and causes: A critique of Brette's conceptual analysis of coding

“…I have investigated these questions extensively, and concluded that the British nerve physiologist Edgar Douglas Adrian (1889-1977) deserves most of the credit for introducing the metaphor (Garson 2015). Adrian's most notable accomplishment was his recording, in 1925, of the action potential of a single sensory neuron (Adrian and Zotterman 1926).…”

Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices in the Work of Henri Bergson and Charles Scott Sherrington

“…This also entailed the adoption of representation-centered modes of investigation even where such tools invited novel forms of sensory testing. Thus during the 1920s, physiological engagement with radio transmission and reception devices was largely confined to their adaptation for recording purposes rather than any sensory effects that they might have had (Garson 2015).…”