W. Grey Walter
| William Grey Walter | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | February 19, 1910 Kansas City, Missouri |
| Died | May 6, 1977 (aged 67) Clifton, Bristol, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | United States |
| Citizenship | United Kingdom |
| Known for | Brain Wave, Delta wave, Alpha wave, Autonomous robot |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Robotics, neurophysiology |
William Grey Walter (February 19, 1910 – May 6, 1977) was an American-born British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician.
Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1910. His ancestry was German/British on his father's side, and American/British on his mother's side. He was brought to England in 1915, and educated at Westminster School and afterwards in King's College, Cambridge, in 1931. He failed to obtain a research fellowship in Cambridge and so turned to doing basic and applied neurophysiological research in hospitals, in London, from 1935 to 1939 and then at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, from 1939 to 1970. He also carried out research work in the United States, in the Soviet Union and in various other places in Europe. He married twice, and had two sons from his first marriage and one from the second. According to his eldest son, Nicolas Walter, "he was politically on the left, a communist fellow-traveller before the Second World War and an anarchist sympathiser after it." Throughout his life he was a pioneer in the field of cybernetics. In 1970 he suffered a brain injury in a motor scooter accident. He never fully recovered and died seven years later, on May 6, 1977.
As a young man Walter was greatly influenced by the work of the famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. He visited the lab of Hans Berger, who invented the electroencephalograph, or EEG machine, for measuring electrical activity in the brain. Walter produced his own versions of Berger's machine with improved capabilities, which allowed it to detect a variety of brain wave types ranging from the high speed alpha waves to the slow delta waves observed during sleep.
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