Richard Caton

Richard Caton (* 1842, † 1926) was a doctor in Liverpool. Caton registered in 1875 for the first time electrical activity of the cerebral cortex of animals. This was the first step in electroencephalography. Hans Berger quoted him in 1929 in his epochal work.

He is better known as Lord Mayor of Liverpool, he was in 1907 in his home.

Introduction of the ECoG

With his experiments on monkeys and rabbits Richard Caton has introduced the principle of Elektrocorticogramms. He has observed that it comes to a galvanometer whose electrodes are attached to different places on the surface of the gray matter to rashes. In particular, he has found correlations between the voltages on the surface of the brain and the function of the areas under investigation, it has, for example, a change to the closing of the eyelids associated with the complex registers when the opposite retina was stimulated with light.