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The ontological hybridity of first-generation cybernetics will be apparent.
While we can read Walter's work as thematizing a performative vision of our-
selves and the world, the impulse to open up the Black Box of the brain will
also be evident. Cybernetics was born in the matrix of modern science, and
we can explore that too.
William Grey Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1910.
2
His parents
were journalists, his father English, his mother Italian-American. The family
moved to Britain in 1915, and Walter remained there for the rest of his life. At
some stage, in a remarkable coincidence with Ashby, Beer, and Pask, Walter
stopped using his first name and was generally known as Grey (some people un-
derstood him to have a double-barreled surname: Grey-Walter). He was educated
at Westminster School in London and then at King's College Cambridge, where
he gained an honors degree in physiology in 1931 and stayed on for four years'
postgraduate research on nerve physiology and conditioned reflexes, gaining his
MA degree for his dissertation, “Conduction in Nerve and Muscle.” His ambi-
tion was to obtain a college fellowship, but he failed in that and instead took up a
position in the Central Pathological Laboratory of the Maudsley mental hospital
in London in 1935, at the invitation of Frederick Golla, the laboratory's director,
and with the support of a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.
3
Golla encouraged Walter to get into the very new field of electroencepha-
lography (EEG), the technique of detecting the electrical activity of the brain,
brainwaves, using electrodes attached to the scalp. The possibility of detecting
these waves had first been shown by the Jena psychiatrist Hans Berger in 1928
(Borck 2001) but the existence of such phenomena was only demonstrated
in Britain in 1934 by Cambridge neurophysiologists E. D. Adrian and B. H. C.
Matthews. Adrian and Matthews confirmed the existence of what they called
the Berger rhythm, which later became known as the alpha rhythm: an oscil-
lation at around ten cycles per second in electrical potentials within the brain,
displayed by all the subjects they examined. The most striking feature of these
waves was that they appeared in the brain when the subjects' eyes were shut, but
vanished when their eyes were opened (fig. 3.2).
Beyond that, Adrian and Mat-
thews found that “the Berger rhythm is disappointingly constant” (Adrian and
Matthews 1934, 382). But Walter found ways to take EEG research further. He
was something of an electrical engineering genius, designing and building EEG
apparatus and frequency analyzers and collaborating with the Ediswan com-
pany in the production of commercial equipment, and he quickly made some
notable clinical achievements, including the first diagnosis and localization
