Herbert Henri Jasper was born on July 27, 1906 in La Grande, Oregon, U.S.A. He began his university education studying philosophy and psychology, receiving his B.A. at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1927, and his M.A. at the University of Oregon in Eugene in 1929. With a burgeoning interest in the human brain in relation to the mind and behaviour, Jasper completed his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Iowa in 1931. At this time he married Constance Cleaver, with whom he had a daughter, Marilyn. His thesis work from Iowa was recognized by an appointment as National Research Council Foreign Fellow, leading to two years of study at the Sorbonne in Paris, from 1931-32, with Alexandre and Andrée Monnier and Louis Lapicque. In 1932, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation allowed him to establish an EEG laboratory at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he carried out pioneering EEG work and published the first paper in the United States on the human EEG in Science in 1935. During this time he was also a professor in the psychology department. He received his D. és. Sci. from the University of Paris in 1935. Herbert Jasper continued to attend conferences and give lectures until his death on March 11, 1999 from sudden cardiac attack at the age of 92. He is widely recognized as one of the most influential neurophysiologists of the twentieth century.