ROSS ASHBY - The Cybernetic Brain - page 133

Ashby does not explicitly make the point, this argument about “stabilizing
the stabilizer” is of a piece with the conventional psychiatric idea that some
mental fixity lies behind the odd behavior of the mentally ill—mood swings,
for example. What Ashby adds to this is a mechanical model of the go of it.
This simple model of the adaptive brain can thus be seen as at once a model
for thinking about pathology, too. Likewise, it is hard not to relate Ashby's
later thoughts on the density of connections between homeostat units, and
their time to reach equilibrium, with lobotomy. Perhaps the density of neural
interconnections can somehow grow so large that individuals can never come
into equilibrium with their surroundings, so severing a few connections surgi-
cally might enable them to function better. Again, Ashby's understanding of
the normal brain immediately suggests an interpretation of mental pathology
and, in this case, a therapeutic response.
Ashby often failed to drive home these points explicitly in print, but that
proves very little. He contributed, for example, the entry “Cybernetics” to
the first Recent Progress in Psychiatry to appear in Britain after World War II
(Fleming 1950). 38 There he focused on pathological positive feedback in com-
plex machines—“runaway”—as a model for mental illness, leading up to a
lengthy discussion of the stock ways of curing such machine conditions: “to
switch the whole machine off and start again,” “to switch out some abnor-
mal part,” and “to put into the machine a brief but maximal electric impulse”
(Ashby 1950b, 107). We saw this list before in the previous chapter, and when
Walter produced it he was not shy of spelling out the equivalences to sleep
therapy, lobotomy, and ECT, respectively. Given a pulpit to preach to the psy-
chiatric profession, Ashby could bring himself to say only, “These methods of
treatment [of machines] have analogies with psychiatric methods too obvious
to need description” (1950b, 107).
To find more specific and explicit connections between Ashby's cyber-
netics and his professional science, it is interesting to begin with a paper I
mentioned before, his 1953 essay “The Mode of Action of Electro-convulsive
Therapy” (Ashby 1953a). As I said, the body of this paper is devoted to re-
porting biochemical observations on rats that had beeen subjected to electro-
shock, and the theoretical introduction accordingly lays out a framework for
thinking about ECT and brain chemistry. But Ashby also throws in a second
possible interpretation of the action of ECT:
There is a possibility that E. C. T. may have a direct effect on the cortical ma-
chinery, not in its biochemical but in its cybernetic components. . . . It has been
shown [in Design for a Brain ] that one property such systems [of many interacting