GORDON PASK - The Cybernetic Brain - page 312

held visiting positions at several institutions: the University of Illinois, Old
Dominion University, Concordia University, the Open University, MIT, the
University of Mexico, and the Architecture Association in London. But the
principal base for Pask's working life was not an academic one; it was a re-
search organization called System Research that he founded in 1953 together
with his wife and Robin McKinnon-Wood. 4 There Pask pursued his many proj-
ects and engaged in contract research and consulting work. 5
So much for the bare bones of Pask's life; now I want to put some flesh
on them. Before we get into technical details, I want to say something about
Pask the man. The first point to note is that he was the object of an enormous
amount of love and affection. Many people cared for him intensely. There
are two enormous special issues of cybernetics journals devoted entirely to
him, one from 1993 ( Systems Research [Glanville 1993]), the other from 2001
( Kybernetes [Glanville and Scott 2001a]), and both are quite singular in the
depth and openness of the feelings expressed. And this was, no doubt, in part
because he was not like other men—he was a classic “character” in the tra-
ditional British sense (as were Grey Walter and Stafford Beer in their own
ways). There are many stories about Pask. His wife recalled that “Gordon al-
ways denied that he was born, maintaining that he descended from the sky,
fully formed and dressed in a dinner jacket, in a champagne bottle, and that
the Mayor and aldermen of Derby were there to welcome him with a brass
band and the freedom of the city.” It is certainly true that he liked to dress as
an Edwardian dandy (bow tie, double-breasted jacket and cape). At school, he
built a bomb which caused considerable damage to the chemistry lab (which
his father paid a lot of money to put right), and he claimed that “the best
thing about his school was that it taught him to be a gangster.” At Cambridge,
he would cycle between staying awake for forty-eight hours and sleeping for
sixteen (E. Pask n.d.). Later in life he became more or less nocturnal. His
daughter Amanda told me that she would bring friends home from school
to see her father emerge as night fell. Pask's ambition in studying medicine
at Cambridge was to follow in his brother Edgar's footsteps, but as one of his
contemporaries, the eminent psychologist Richard Gregory, put it, this story
“is perhaps best forgotten.” Pask apparently tried to learn anatomy by studying
only the footnotes of the canonical text, Gray's Anatomy , and (Gregory 2001,
685-86) “this saved him for two terms—until disaster struck. He was asked
to dissect, I think an arm, which was on a glass dissecting table. Gordon was
always very impetuous, moving in sudden jerks. Looking around and seeing
that no-one was looking at him, he seized a fire axe, swung it around his head,
to sever the arm. He missed, There was an almighty crash, and the arm fell