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published technical sources on the tortoises are Walter's two articles in Sci-
entific American in May 1950 and August 1951 and his 1953 popular topic The
Living Brain . These contributed greatly to the public visibility of Walter and
the tortoises, but let me postpone discussion of substantive outcomes of this
publicity for a while.
As an academic myself, I have tended to assume that the proper readership
and home for a field like cybernetics would be a scholarly one. Walter did not
publish any detailed accounts of the tortoises alone in the scholarly literature,
but in the early 1950s they often featured as parts of his emerging account
of the brain as otherwise explored in EEG research. A lecture delivered to a
psychiatric audience published in January 1950, for example, began with a
discussion of the tortoises (not named as such), their complexity of behavior,
and the significance of scanning, before plunging into the details of EEG find-
ings and their interpretation (Walter 1950b, 3-6). But it is also safe to say that
the major impact of cybernetics was not centered on any established field.
Historical overviews of twentieth-century psychiatry, for example (on which
more shortly), make little or no mention of cybernetics (e.g., Valenstein 1986;
Shorter 1997). 25 And one can see why this should have been. The combina-
tion of brain science and engineering made concrete in the tortoises was a
strange one, both to the sciences of the brain (neurophysiology, EEG research,
psychology, psychiatry) and, from the other direction, to engineering. To do
any of these disciplines on the model of Walter and the tortoises would have
required drastic shifts in practice, which are much harder to make than any
simple shift in the realm of ideas.
This brings us to the third community with which Walter engaged, the
nascent community of cyberneticians in Britain. The 1948 publication of
Wiener's Cybernetics both put the word itself into circulation in Britain and
helped crystallize the formation of a self-consciously cybernetic community
there. On 27 July 1949 John Bates of the Neurological Research Institute of the
National Hospital in London wrote to Walter as follows:
Dear Grey,
I have been having a lot of “Cybernetic” discussions during the past few
weeks here and in Cambridge during a Symposium on Animal Behaviour
Mechanisms, and it is quite clear that there is a need for the creation of an
environment in which these subjects can be discussed freely. It seems that the
essentials are a closed and limited membership and a post-prandial situation,
in fact a dining-club in which conventional scientific criteria are eschewed. I
know personally about 15 people who had Wiener's ideas before Wiener's topic
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