GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 73

Strange Performances
For the remainder of this chapter I want to come at Walter's work from a dif-
ferent angle. The tortoises and CORA were Walter's most distinctive contri-
bution to the early development of cybernetics, but they occupied him only
in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and here we can examine some of his more
enduring concerns with the brain—and how they crossed over into the coun-
terculture of the sixties.
As I mentioned earlier, Walter's research career was centered on EEG work,
and this, like the tortoises though in a different register, again thematized the
brain as a performative organ. And the point we need to dwell on now is that,
as I remarked in chapter 1, one can be curious about the performative brain in
a way that a cognitive conception hardly invites. If one thinks about conscious
mental operations, as in mainstream AI and the cognitive sciences, there is
not much to be curious about. The task for AI is thus to model on a computer
familiar cognitive feats like playing chess, solving equations, or logical deduc-
tion. In contrast, the performative brain is more of a challenge. We have little
conscious access to processes of adaptation, for example. Who knows what
a performative brain can do? This is a sense in which the brain appears as
one of Beer's exceedingly complex systems, endlessly explorable. Finding out
what the brain can do was a central aspect of Walter's research throughout his
career, and we can examine some interesting aspects of that here. 56
Walter's 1953 topic The Living Brain is largely devoted to the science of the
normal brain and its pathologies, epilepsy and mental illness. But in differ-
ent passages it also goes beyond the pathological to include a whole range of
what one might call altered states and strange performances: dreams, visions,
synesthesia, hallucination, hypnotic trance, extrasensory perception, the
achievement of nirvana and the weird abilities of Eastern yogis and fakirs—the
“strange feats” of “grotesque cults” (1953, 148) such as suspending breathing
and the heartbeat and tolerating intense pain. 57 What should we make of this?
1. It exemplifies the sort of curiosity about the performative brain that I
just mentioned—this is a list of odd things that brains, according to Walter,
can do. 58
2. It conjures up an understanding of the brain as an active participant
in the world. Even in the field of perception and representation, phenom-
ena such as dreams and hallucinations might be taken to indicate that the
brain does not copy the world but assimilates sensory inputs to a rich inner
dynamics. The tortoise did not thematize this aspect of the brain (except, to