ROSS ASHBY - The Cybernetic Brain - page 96

Figure 4.2. “the most important variables affected by e.c.t.” reproduced with
permission from w. r. ashby, “the mode of action of electro-convulsive therapy,”
Journal of Mental Science, 99 (1953), 203, fig. 1. ( © 1953 the royal college of
psychiatrists.)
mental patients, and we can note that in this work Ashby had moved from his
earlier interest in the pathological brain per se to the biological mechanisms
of psychiatric treatment.
This shift in focus intensified after Ashby's move to Barnwood House in
1947. Not far from the Burden Neurological Institute, Barnwood House was
at the epicenter of radical psychiatric cures in Britain. Its director, G. W. T. H.
Fleming, was the first author listed, with Golla and Walter, on the first pub-
lished report on the use of electroconvulsive therapy in Britain (Fleming,
Golla, and Walter 1939, discussed in the previous chapter). Ashby had no
doubts about the efficacy of ECT: “Electroshock therapy . . . has long passed
its period of probation and is now universally accepted as active and effective.”
“Yet,” he wrote, “its mode of action is still unknown.” From its introduction
there had been speculation that ECT achieved its ends not directly, via the
shock itself, but by inducing some therapeutic change in the chemistry of the
brain, and this was what Ashby sought to elucidate at Barnwood House, most
notably in a long essay on his empirical research published in 1949, which
won a prize—the £100 Burlingame Prize awarded by the Royal Medico-
Psychological Association. There, Ashby reported on his own observations
on fourteen mental patients who had been subjected to ECT and concluded,
“The usual effect of convulsive therapy is to cause a brisk outpouring of ad-
renal chemical steroids during the first few days of the treatment. . . . There
is evidence that [this] outpouring . . . is associated with a greater tendency to
clinical recovery” (Ashby 1949a, 275, 321). Again, we see the characteristic
concern to illuminate the material “go of it”—now to spell out the beginning
of a chain of effects leading from the administration of electroshock to modi-
fied mental performances. And Ashby followed this up in, for example, a 1953