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in enabling more efficient air defence is difficult to ascertain.
Some of the most important concepts for Cybernetics were devel-
oped in the so-called Macy Conferences, which were initiated in
1942
with a seminar called the Cerebral Inhibition Meeting, held at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Organized by the Josiah
Macy Jr Foundation's medical director Frank Fremont-Smith, the
seminar brought together mathematicians, physiologists and engi-
neers, to discuss the work that Wiener and others were developing
and how it might be applied to different disciplines. Among those
participating by invitation were Warren McCulloch, the anthropol-
ogists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, psychologist Lawrence
K. Frank, and psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie. One of the immediate
results of the seminar was a paper, published in
by Wiener
and Arturo Rosenblueth, with the help of Julian Bigelow, entitled
'Behaviour, Purpose, and Teleology',
2
which enframed the ideas
of negative feedback and teleological behaviour that had been
developed in relation to self-regulating systems. The next year
McCulloch, along with the brilliant young mathematician Walter
Pitts, was to publish a paper entitled 'Logical Calculus of Ideas
Immanent in Nervous Activity',
3
which suggested that the workings
of the brain could be modelled in terms of a network of logical
operations. This paper was extremely influential both in presenting
a model for understanding the operations of the brain, and in
modelling the operations of machines in terms of mental processes.
The seminar was successful enough to attract funding for a series
of conferences from the Josiah Macy Foundation. These ran from
1946
1943
and generated a great deal of interest and excitement.
Among those attending the first conference was John von Neumann,
who was able to bring to the conferences his experiences with digital
technology, while applying the formalist ideas of McCulloch and
Pitts to his understanding of such machinery. In
to
1954
von Neumann,
along with Wiener, McCulloch, Pitts and Howard Aiken, designer
of the Harvard Mk
1944
1
electromechanical computer, had formed the
