Milligan's EEG Records

Milligan's EEG Records are two brain-wave examinations made at Harding Hospital in May 1978, while William Stanley Milligan was being examined under court order. Their divergent findings later prompted Daniel Keyes to reconsider whether the recordings might reflect different personalities. The records do not settle that question: their importance lies in the tension between the physicians' descriptions, the limits of what those descriptions establish, and the later research that gave Keyes a new way to read them.

The Examinations and Their Findings

Keyes encountered the reports among documents he had examined while researching the book. The two examinations had been administered two weeks apart by different physicians. The first, dated May 9, was reported by Dr. P. R. Hyman. He described the tracing as abnormal because it showed theta and delta waves in the right rear hemisphere, slow-wave activity he noted was not normally seen in an awake adult, though it was seen in children. Hyman considered a technical problem a probable explanation. He also recorded that the technologist had changed the electrode without proving whether the suspected problem accounted for the result, and recommended repeating the EEG.

The second examination, reported by Dr. James Parker on May 22, did not show the localized abnormality described in the earlier tracing. Instead, Parker recorded background intermittent alpha activity, along with bilateral theta and delta waves and bilateral temporal sharp waves. He noted that the sharp waves could be epileptiform. Thus the second report did not simply reproduce the first: it described a different pattern, while still registering abnormalities of its own. The contrast between the two reports became the records' central unresolved feature.

Research That Changed the Reading

Keyes revisited the files four years after the examinations, after learning about research presented by psychiatrist Dr. Frank Putnam at a May 1982 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Putnam had tested ten people diagnosed with multiple personality, examining each person's core personality and two or three alternate personalities. For comparison, he used ten individuals matched to the diagnosed subjects for age and sex; those controls were instructed to invent alternate personalities with detailed histories and traits and to practice switching among them.

The tests were repeated in random order across five different days, producing fifteen or twenty tests for each person. The controls and their invented personalities showed no significant changes in brain-wave patterns. By contrast, the diagnosed subjects' personalities showed marked differences both from their core personalities and from one another. The study did not test Milligan's 1978 EEGs, which predated its presentation. It supplied a later research context in which Keyes could ask whether the discrepancies in Milligan's two examinations might matter in a similar way.

Keyes also noted a report in Science News of research at the Institute for Living in Hartford, where psychologist Collin Pitblado had described similar results in a patient with four personalities. Putnam told Keyes that ten to fifteen percent of the EEGs of multiple-personality patients he had tested showed abnormal brain waves. He added that those patients also had a history of having been diagnosed previously as epileptic, and that similar reports of abnormal EEGs in multiple personality had appeared at Harvard. These findings offered context for the irregularities in the Milligan records, but did not identify their cause.

Keyes's Interpretation and Its Limits

After reviewing the reports, Keyes showed their descriptions to a registered EEG technologist. The technologist said they seemed to describe two different people. Keyes interpreted the disparity as consistent with the emerging research on physiological differences among personalities and suggested that the two examinations may have been administered to different personalities, probably the children. This is presented as his inference, not as a conclusion recorded by Hyman or Parker or as a finding established by the tests themselves.

The records therefore hold together two levels of evidence that should not be mistaken for one another. Hyman and Parker documented particular wave patterns and offered medical interpretations, including a possible technical explanation for the first examination and a possibility of epileptiform activity in the second. Keyes, looking back in 1982, placed those reports beside research on diagnosed subjects and deliberately instructed controls. The new research made a personality-based interpretation conceivable to him; it did not retrospectively verify who was present during either recording.

Place in Milligan's Case

The EEGs belong to the period when Milligan was undergoing examination at Harding Hospital under court order. Elsewhere in the legal record, multiple personality was explicitly identified as his diagnosis: the December 10, 1979 court findings described his condition as multiple personality and directed that treatment be consistent with that diagnosis. The EEG reports add a separate, physiological thread to the book's account of how Milligan was examined and understood. They do not themselves provide a legal determination, establish criminal responsibility, or demonstrate that the personalities had distinct brain-wave patterns. Their narrative force comes instead from the gap between a pair of anomalous, differently described tracings and the later hypothesis that they might have registered different people within the same body.