2018-01-28 13:16:34
Electroencephalography was invented by the German doctor Hans Berger in 1924. This man believed in telepathy, which, if it existed, involved the remote transmission of signals between brains. In an attempt to discover this transmission, Dr. Berger attached electrodes to the scalps of some volunteers and analyzed the electrical voltage changes they registered. He thus discovered, in effect, that the electrodes revealed changes in brain activity. One of the most significant occurred when closing the eyes. Dr. Berger named the waves recorded by the electrodes in this case as alpha waves. Until today they have been considered the most important electromagnetic signature of the human brain.
Substantial technological advances have enabled the development of small EEG machines that can be easily transported and used to study the brain activity of people living in remote areas who have not yet been in close contact with modernity. With this idea, Dr. Tara Thiagarajan and her team have studied the brain activity of more than four hundred people in a rural area of southern India.
Before performing the electroencephalogram, the researchers submitted the participants to an extensive questionnaire, in which they asked about their education, their level of income, their way of communicating with others, the use of technology, modern means of transportation, etc. . After this questionnaire, they recorded the brain activity in the fourteen electrodes of the portable electroencephalograph that they had.
The surprising result of these studies was that in some people no alpha oscillation was recorded, which until then had been considered the most important in the human brain. This phenomenon had never been observed before. What was happening?
When they contrasted the data from the questionnaires with the absence or presence of alpha waves in the participants, the scientists realized that the parameter that best explained the absence of alpha waves, or weaker-than-normal alpha waves, was income. economic.
The relationship that the scientists found between income and alpha waves was exponential. People with incomes of less than a dollar a day lacked alpha waves. These appeared and quickly rose in intensity from incomes greater than one dollar to 30 dollars a day. From this value of income, the intensity of the alpha waves increased more slowly and reached a maximum for an income of 50 dollars per day. This relationship was also very strong with the amount of fuel consumed for transportation. The greater the trips and displacements, the greater the alpha waves were also.
These studies again indicate that human brain diversity and plasticity are high and that it is necessary to study large numbers of brains from many people in diverse environments and cultures to be able to assess it correctly.
Referencia: Alpha Oscillations and Modernization.
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