Life's Potentials
91
implying a current flowing up the brain stem and between the two
hemispheres to the front.
At the time, these observations seemed mighty odd. They didn't fit
any concepts of how the nerves worked. As a result, they were largely
ignored. The majority of neurophysiologists went on measuring the ac-
tion potentials and tracing out fiber pathways in the brain. This was
useful work but limited. The basic questions remained.
Only one research team followed up this work, some ten years later.
Sidney Goldring and James L. O'Leary, neuropsychiatrists at the Wash-
ington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recorded the same
DC potentials from the human scalp, from the exposed brain during
surgery, and from the brains of monkeys and rabbits. As noted before,
the potentials varied in regular cycles several minutes long, like a basso
continuo under the EEG. In fact, Goldring and O'Leary found waves
within waves: "Written upon the slow major swings were lesser voltage
changes." These were weak potentials, measured in microvolts (mil-
lionths of a volt) and varying in waves of 2 to 30 cycles per minute, sort
of a pianissimo "inner voice" in a three-part electrical fugue.
Conducting in a New Mode
I was acutely aware that I didn't have the "proper" background for the
work I planned to do. I wasn't a professional neurophysiologist; I didn't
even know one. Indeed, after my run-in with the research committee,
one member had taken me aside and earnestly advised me, "Go back to
school and get your Ph.D., Becker. Then you'll learn all of this stuff is
nonsense." Still, some of the greatest neurophysiologists had thought
the same way I did about "all of this stuff." They suggested we might
have been too hasty in throwing electric currents out of biology. My
notion of putting them back in wasn't so outlandish, but only an exten-
sion of what they'd been saying. I was approaching the body's system of
information transfer from the periphery, asking, "What makes wounds
heal?" They'd started from the center, asking, "How does the brain
work?" We were working on the same problem from opposite ends. As I
contemplated their findings and all of biology's unsolved problems, I
grew convinced that life was more complex than we suspected. I felt that
those who reduced life to a mechanical interaction of molecules were
living in a cold, gray, dead world, which, despite its drabness, was a
fantasy. I didn't think electricity would turn to be any elan vital in
the old sense, but I had a hunch would be closer to the secret than the