ROSS ASHBY - The Cybernetic Brain - page 94

brain not into his own work on systems but into Stafford Beer's management
cybernetics—the topic of the next chapter.
The skeleton of what follows is this. I begin with a brief discussion of
Ashby's distinctly clinical research. Then I embark on a discussion of the de-
velopment of his cybernetics, running through the homeostat and Design for
a Brain up to the homeostat's failed successor, DAMS. Then I seek to reunite
these two threads in an exploration of the relation between Ashby's cybernet-
ics and his clinical work up the late 1950s. After that, we can pick up the third
thread just mentioned, and look at the extensions of Ashby's research beyond
the brain. Finally, I discuss echoes of Ashby's work up to the present, in fields
as diverse as architecture, theoretical biology and cellular automata studies.
Throughout, I draw heavily upon Ashby's handwritten private journal that
he kept throughout his adult life and various notebooks, now available at the
British Library in London. 4
The Pathological brain
When one reads Ashby's canonical works in cybernetics it is easy to imagine
that they have little to do with his professional life in medicine and psychiatry.
It is certainly the case that in following the trajectory of his distinctive contri-
butions to cybernetics, psychiatry recedes into the shadows. Nevertheless, as
I will try to show later, these two strands of Ashby's research were intimately
connected, and, indeed, the concern with insanity came first. To emphasize
this, I begin with some remarks on his medical career.
Overall, it is important to remember that Ashby spent his entire work-
ing life in Britain in mental institutions; it would be surprising if that milieu
had nothing to do with his cybernetic vision of the brain. More specifically,
it is clear that Ashby, like Walter, belonged to a very materialist school of
psychiatry led in Britain by Frederick Golla. Though I have been unable to
determine when Ashby first met Golla and Walter, all three men moved in
the same psychiatric circles in London in the mid-1930s, and it is probably
best to think of them as a group. 5 It is clear, in any event, that from an early
date Ashby shared with the others a conviction that all mental phenomena
have a physical basis in the brain and a concomitant concern to understand
the go of the brain, just how the brain turned specific inputs into specific
outputs. And this concern is manifest in Ashby's earliest publications. At the
start of his career, in London between 1930 and 1936, he published seventeen
research papers in medical journals, seeking in different ways to explore con-