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Ratcliffe, with whom he had two children, and from 1947 to 1960 to Vivian
Dovey, a radiographer and scientific officer at the Burden, with whom he co-
authored papers and had a son. From 1960 to 1974 he lived with Lorraine
Aldridge in the wife swap mentioned above (R. Cooper 1993; Hayward 2001a,
628). In 1970 Walter's research career came to an end when he suffered a
serious head injury as a result of a collision between the scooter he was riding
(at the age of sixty, let us recall) and a runaway horse. He was in a coma for a
week, suffered serious brain damage, and never fully recovered. He returned
to work at the Burden as a consultant from 1971 until his retirement in 1975
and died suddenly of a heart attack in 1976 (Cooper and Bird 1989, 60).
Walter's most distinctive contribution to cybernetics came in 1948, with
the construction of the first of his robot tortoises. He was one of the founders
of the Ratio Club, the key social venue for the British cyberneticians, which
met from 1949 until 1955 (Clark 2002, chap. 3, app. A1). He was an invited
guest at the tenth and last of the U.S. Macy cybernetics conferences in 1953
(Heims 1991, 286), and he was a member of the four-man scientific commit-
tee of the first meeting of the European counterpart of the Macys, the 1956
Namur conference—the First International Congress on Cybernetics—where
he presided over section IV, devoted to “cybernetics and life.”
the tortoise and the Brain
How might one study the brain? At different stages of his career, Walter pursued
three lines of attack. One was a classically reductionist approach, looking at
the brain's individual components. Working within a well-established research
tradition, in his postgraduate research at Cambridge he explored the electrical
properties of individual neurons which together make up the brain. One can
indeed make progress this way. It turns out, for example, that neurons have a
digital character, firing electrical signals in spikes rather than continuously; they
have a certain unresponsive “dead time” after firing; they have a threshold below
which they do not respond to incoming spikes; they combine inputs in various
ways. But if one is interested in the properties of whole brains, this kind of un-
derstanding does not get one very far. A crude estimate would be that the brain
contains 10
10
neurons and many, many more interconnections between them,
and no one, even today, knows how to sum the properties of that many elements
to understand the behavior of the whole. As Walter put it, “One took an anatomi-
cal glance at the brain, and turned away in despair” (1953, 50). We could see this
as a simple instance of the problem of complexity which will appear in various
