Turbor said, purse-lipped, "We might as well make a beginning somewheres. We'll take your word for it, especially since you're the greatest electroneurologist in the Galaxy now that Kleise is dead. At least, that is the way I've described you in my visicast comment, and I even believe it myself. How old are you, Anthor?"
"Twenty-nine, Mr. Turbor."
"Hm-m-m. And are you an electroneurologist, too? A great one?"
"Just a student of the science. But I work hard, and I've had the benefit of Kleise's training."
Munn broke in. He had a slight stammer at periods of tension. "I... I wish you'd g... get started. I think everyone's t... talking too much."
Dr. Darell lifted an eyebrow in Munn's direction. you're right, Homir. Take over, Pelleas."
"Not for a while," said Pelleas Anthor, slowly, "because before we can get started - although I appreciate Mr. Munn's sentiment - I must request brain-wave data."
Darell frowned. "What is this, Anthor? What brain-wave data do you refer to?"
"The patterns of all of you. You have taken mine, Dr. Darell. I must take yours and those of the rest of you. And I must take the measurements myself."
Turbor said, "There's no reason for him to trust us, Darell. The young man is within his rights."
"Thank you," said Anthor. "If you'll lead the way to your laboratory then, Dr. Darell, well proceed. I took the liberty this morning of checking your apparatus."
The science of electroencephalography was at once new and old. It was old in the sense that the knowledge of the microcurrents generated by nerve cells of living beings belonged to that immense category of human knowledge whose origin was completely lost. It was knowledge that stretched back as far as the earliest remnants of human history-
And yet it was new, too. The fact of the existence of microcurrents slumbered through the tens of thousands of years of Galactic Empire as one of those vivid and whimsical, but quite useless, items of human knowledge. Some had attempted to form classifications of waves into waking and sleeping, calm and excited, well and ill - but even the broadest conceptions had had their hordes of vitiating exceptions.
Others had tried to show the existence of brain-wave groups, analogous to the well-known blood groups, and to show that external environment was the defining factor. These were the race-minded people who claimed that Man could be divided into subspecies. But such a philosophy could make no headway against the overwhelming ecumenical drive involved in the fact of Galactic Empire - one political unit covering twenty million stellar systems, involving all of Man from the central world of Trantor - now a gorgeous and impossible memory of the great past - to the loneliest asteroid on the periphery.
And then again, in a society given over, as that of the First Empire was, to the physical sciences and inanimate technology, there was a vague but mighty sociological push away from the study of the mind. It was less respectable because less immediately useful; and it was poorly financed since it was less profitable.
After the disintegration of the First Empire, there came the fragmentation of organized science, back, back - past even the fundamentals of atomic power into the chemical power of coal and oil. The one exception to this, of course, was the First Foundation where the spark of science, revitalized and grown more intense was maintained and fed to flame. Yet there, too, it was the physical that ruled, and the brain, except for surgery, was neglected ground.
Hari Seldon was the first to express what afterwards came to be accepted as truth.
"Neural microcurrents," he once said, "carry within them the spark of every varying impulse and response, conscious and unconscious. The brain-waves recorded on neatly squared paper in trembling peaks and troughs are the mirrors of the combined thought-pulses of billions of cells. Theoretically, analysis should reveal the thoughts and emotions of the subject, to the last and least. Differences should be detected that are due not only to gross physical defects, inherited or acquired, but also to shifting states of emotion, to advancing education and experience, even to something as subtle as a change in the subject's philosophy of life."
But even Seldon could approach no further than speculation.
And now for fifty years, the men of the First Foundation had been tearing at that incredibly vast and complicated storehouse of new knowledge. The approach, naturally, was made through new techniques - as, for example, the use of electrodes at skull sutures by a newly-developed means which enabled contact to be made directly with the gray cells, without even the necessity of shaving a patch of skull. And then there was a recording device which automatically recorded the brain-wave data as an overall total, and as separate functions of six independent variables.
What was most significant, perhaps, was the growing respect in which encephalography and the encephalographer was held. Kleise, the greatest of them, sat at scientific conventions on an equal basis with the physicist. Dr. Darell, though no longer active in the science, was known for his brilliant advances in encephalographic analysis almost as much as for the fact that he was the son of Bayta Darell, the great heroine of the past generation.
And so now, Dr. Darell sat in his own chair, with the delicate touch of the feathery electrodes scarcely hinting at pressure upon his skull, while the vacuum-incased needles wavered to and fro. His back was to the recorder - otherwise, as was well known, the sight of the moving curves induced an unconscious effort to control them, with noticeable results - but he knew that the central dial was expressing the strongly rhythmic and little-varying Sigma curve, which was to be expected of his own powerful and disciplined mind. It would be strengthened and purified in the subsidiary dial dealing with the Cerebellar wave. There would be the sharp, near-discontinuous leaps from the frontal lobe, and the subdued shakiness from the subsurface regions with its narrow range of frequencies-