GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 42

guises in this chapter and the next: there exist systems for which an atomic
understanding fails to translate into a global one. This is the sense in which the
brain counted for Stafford Beer as an exemplary “exceedingly complex system.”
Walter's second line of attack emerged on his move to London. His EEG
work aimed at mapping the properties of the brain. What does the brain do ?
Well, it emits small but complicated electrical signals that are detectable by
sensitive electronic apparatus. Such signals, both oscillatory (waves) and sin-
gular, were what Walter devoted his life to studying. This proved to be diffi-
cult. Other rhythms of electrical activity—the so-called beta, theta, and delta
bands of brainwaves at frequencies both above and below the alphas—were
discovered, but EEG readouts revealed the brain to be very noisy, and distin-
guishing correlations between inputs and outputs was problematic. Echoing
the findings of Adrian and Matthews in 1934, Walter (1953, 90) observed that
“very few of the factors affecting the spontaneous rhythms were under the
observation or control of experimenter or subject. Usually only the effects of
opening or closing the eyes, of doing mental arithmetic, of overbreathing and
of changes in the blood sugar could be investigated. . . . The range and variety
of methods were not comparable with the scope and sensitivity of the organ
studied, and the information obtained by them was patchy in the extreme.”
The electric brain, one could say, proved more complex than the variables in
terms of which researchers might hope to map it. 8
We can return to Walter's EEG work at various points as we go along, but I
can enter a couple of preliminary comments on it here. As ontological theater, it
evidently stages for us a vision of the brain as a performative organ rather than a
cognitive one—an organ that acts (here, emitting electrical signals) rather than
thinks. Equally evidently, such a conception of the brain destabilizes any clean
dualist split between people and things: the performative brain as just one Black
Box to be studied among many. 9 At the same time, though, as we will see shortly,
Walter's ambition was always to open up the Black Box, in pursuit of its in-
ner go. This is what I mean by referring to the hybrid quality of his cybernetics.
Walter's third line of attack on the brain was the one that I have talked
about before: the classically scientific tactic of building models of the brain.
The logic here is simple: if a model can emulate some feature of the system
modelled, one has learned something, if only tentatively, about the go of the
latter, its inner workings. As Roberto Cordeschi (2002) has shown, one can
trace the lineage of this approach in experimental psychology back to the early
years of the twentieth century, including, for example, the construction of a
phototropic electric dog in 1915. The early years of cybernetics were marked