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ing with servomechanisms in the war was, in fact, what led Wiener into the
field he subsequently named. Walter's robot tortoises and Ashby's homeostat
were more striking and original examples of adaptive mechanisms, and they
were at the forefront of “brain science” in the late 1940s and throughout the
1950s. A phrase of Warren McCulloch's comes to mind. Speaking of another
British protocybernetician, the experimental psychologist Kenneth Craik,
McCulloch remarked that Craik always wanted to understand “the go of it”—
meaning, to grasp the specific mechanical or quasi-mechanical connections
that linked inputs and outputs in complex systems like the brain.
4
Cybernetic
devices like tortoises and homeostats aimed precisely to illuminate the go of
the adaptive brain.
There is something strange and striking about adaptive mechanisms. Most
of the examples of engineering that come to mind are not adaptive. Bridges
and buildings, lathes and power presses, cars, televisions, computers, are all
designed to be
indifferent
to their environment, to withstand fluctuations, not
to adapt to them. The best bridge is one that just stands there, whatever the
weather. Cybernetic devices, in contrast, explicitly aimed to be sensitive and
responsive to changes in the world around them, and this endowed them with
a disconcerting, quasi-magical, disturbingly lifelike quality. Wiener himself
was well aware of this, and his writings are dotted with references to the Sor-
cerer's Apprentice (who casts a magical spell that sets matter in motion and
cannot be undone) and the Golem of Prague (magically animated clay). Wal-
ter likewise spoke of “the totems of primitive man” and invoked the figure of
Frankenstein's monster (1953, 113, 115). This sense of mystery and transgres-
sion has always attached to cybernetics, and accounts, I think, for much of its
glamour
—the spell it casts over people, including myself.
I need to say more about cybernetics, the brain, and psychiatry. The early cy-
bernetics of Walter and Ashby directly concerned the brain as an anatomical
organ. The tortoise and the homeostat were intended as electromechanical
models of the physiological brain, normal and pathological, with the latter
providing a direct link to the brutal approaches to psychiatry that were domi-
nant from the 1930s to the 1950s, chemical and electrical shock therapies and
lobotomy. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, a different form of cybernetic
psychiatry emerged, often, though somewhat misleadingly, labeled “anti-
psychiatry” for its opposition to violent interventions in mental illness (and,
indeed, for its opposition to the concept of mental illness). I associate this
