\"Electroencephalography\" Donald B. Lindsley Signed FDC Dated 1963 For Sale

Up for sale a Donald B. Lindsley Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1963. 

23, 1907 – June 19, 2003) was a physiological psychologist most

known as a pioneer in the field of brain function study. Considered by his

colleagues to have been worthy of winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology for

discovering the reticular activating

system along with Horace Winchell (Tid) Magoun and Giuseppe Moruzzi, Lindsley was instrumental in demonstrating

the use the study of brain function. In

December 23, 1907 Lindsley was born in Brownhelm, Ohio, a small farming

community near Cleveland. He was the youngest of four sons, one of which did

not live past infancy. His father, Benjamin worked for the Cleveland Stone

Company as a parts manager. Through his high school years Lindsley excelled as

an athlete, winning medals and titles in track, baseball, and basketball. He

lived a simple, small town country life, spending his summers fishing and

hunting in the cold seasons. He played the trumpet which served to pay his

passage on a cruise ship to Europe. He did not have aspirations of going to

college since no one in his family had done so before nor could his family

afford it. However through the encouragement of one of his teachers, he pursued

a higher education deciding he would work his way through college. His

commitment to the field of psychology began at Wittenberg College in

1925.

Lindsley attended Wittenberg College (now University) in 1925-1929 and

received his PhD in psychology from the University of Iowa under

a scholarship. It was at the University of Iowa that he met his wife, Ellen

Ford. She was a theater arts major and the daughter of Arthur Ford - a professor

of electrical engineering at the University of Iowa. They later married in 1933

and were married for sixty-two years. It was at the University of Iowa that

Lindsley mastered the use of lab equipment and physiology, publishing six papers on human and rat muscle

activity. In 1945, Lindsley undertook basic neurophysiological research with

Horace Winchell Mangoun at the Northwestern Medical

School in downtown Chicago. The 19th century prevailing theory

of sleep and waking stated that brain organization and behavior was based on a

sensory-motor schema. The waking state was thought to be supported by sensory

input while sleep was conceived as the product of sensory withdrawal. This

theory was reasonable and unchallenged at the time as there was no knowledge of

another major type of system in the brain beyond sensory and motor systems. In

1949, Mangoun and visiting scientist, Giuseppe Moruzzi from the University of Pisa,

challenged this theory when they accidentally discovered a new type of brain

system while experimenting with spinal reflexes on an anesthetized cat. This brain system's existence had not

yet been suspected. This research was argued by proponents until Lindsley led a

team to perform the experiments that established the validity to this new system,

the ascending reticular activating

system and came up with Activation theory. It postulated that

there is an arousal continuum on which significantly lower emotion at one

extreme and intense emotion at the other can be located through EEG from the

reticular substance and thus concluded an organism is in a continuous state of

emotional flux related to the state and environment they habituate.