The Telegraphed Brain

Abstract

Abstract This chapter traces the long history of the neuron doctrine via the cultural phenomenon of the telegraph in British and American poetry and prose. At a time when many scientists still considered the majority of the brain to consist of a simple “primordial mass,” the telegraph proposed a different take on the material nature of thought. Even decades before neurons could be observed in the brain, the now common experience of transmitting “thought” over wires teased the cultural imaginary of the mid-1800s to conceptualize the brain as a system of connected wires. Especially in periodicals, a multitude of writers, engineers, and physicians (both trained and amateur) began to translate the Romantic notion of brain-as-harp into the technophile metaphor of the telegraph-brain—a metaphor that, in turn, laid the groundwork for one of the most important insights about the material structure of the brain: its electrochemical, neuronal nature.