English: Experiment by US radio engineer Archie Frederick Collins in 1902 to try to use a human brain as a radio wave detector. At this early point in radio history, the poor performance of the existing device used in receivers to detect radio waves, the coherer, motivated much scientific research to find new radio wave detectors. Collins reasoned that since the brain was known to work electrically, it might be sensitive to radio waves. He used a fresh brain from a cadaver in a salt solution, and attached electrodes to the brain tissue. He ran a low DC current from the batteries shown through the tissue. Then he exposed it to radio wave pulses in the UHF band from a Hertzian spark transmitter, and listened for audio signals with earphones in the circuit. If the nervous tissue changed conductivity when the pulses of radio waves hit it, the way a coherer did, it should cause variations in current that should be audible as clicks in the earphone. He claimed that the brain did have a 'cohering' effect, but efforts to repeat his experiment failed to confirm the effect.