The Cybernetic Brain

by Andrew Pickering

  47. "Of course," he added, "were the model an engine for guiding a projectile or regulating the processes of an oil refinery, this tendency to neurotic depression would be a serious fault, but as an imitation of life it is only too successful."

  48. In 1954 Walter recalled that in Cambridge in 1934, working with Pavlov's student Rosenthal, he had mistakenly imposed inconsistent conditioning regimes on experimental dogs: "One of the five dogs retained a quite reasonable conditioned reflex system, two of them became inert and unresponsive, and two became anxious and neurotic" (1971 [1954]. 54).

  49. Thus, as one would expect, cybernetics emerged from a distinctively performative approach to psychiatry (in contrast, say, to the inherently representational approach of psychoanalysis). On the history of psychiatric therapies in this period, see Valenstein (1986) and Shorter (1997). Sleep therapy in fact developed earlier than the others and was hardly as benign as Walter suggests. It consisted in inducing sleep lasting for days or a week, using first bromides and then barbiturates. Shorter mentions a study in the late 1920s that found a 5% mortality in sleep cures. William Burroughs (who reappears below) includes sleep therapy in his catalog of the cures he had attempted for heroin addiction: "The end result was a combined syndrome of unparalleled horror. No cure I ever took was as painful as this allegedly painless method. . . . After two weeks in the hospital (five days sedation, ten days 'rest') I was still so weak that I fainted when I tried to walk up a slight incline. I consider prolonged sleep the worst possible method of treating withdrawal" (Burroughs 2001 [1956]. 219). In British psychiatry, the most important of the desperate cures was ECT, first used by the Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti in 1938.

  50. The report acknowledges that Walter's attempts at EEG research had not borne fruit in the form of scientific publications and focuses on clinical applications of EEG techniques in the localization of brain tumors and explorations of epilepsy, from which "disappointingly meagre conclusions can be drawn" (Walter 1938, 11). One of Walter's "first jobs" at the Burden "was to set up a clinical EEG department—the first in the country—in which epilepsy could be further studied" (Cooper and Bird 1989, 67).

  51. "Golla wishing to assess the method [ECT], got GreyWalter to make the necessary equipment. . . . After trying it out on a sheep which had 'neat fits' the first ECT in Great Britain was done in the Institute in 1939" (Roy Cooper, "Archival Material from the Burden Neurological Institute, Bristol," May 2000, 31: Science Museum, BNI archive §6).

  52. The author unmentioned so far, GeraldWilliam Thomas Hunter Fleming, was physician superintendent of Barnwood House, Gloucester, a mental hospital close to the Burden, where Ashby was employed from 1947 to 1959 and did much of his foundational work in cybernetics. Fleming reappears in the next chapter in connection with Ashby's brief and disastrous appointment as director of the Burden.

  53. See note 23 above. Walter (1938, 12–13) also mentions an experimental lobotomy. "Aware at the same time how flimsy was the excuse for intervention, Dr. Golla, Mr. Wylie McKissock and myself decided to operate on one of Dr. Golla's patients at Maida Vale." Part of the superior frontal gyrus of an epileptic patient was removed, and the patient was then free from fits for six weeks, after which they returned. Walter comments that "these cases are reported here . . . to illustrate the disappointments which are likely to attend the extension of electro-encephalography from the purely diagnostic to the therapeutic field, and also to indicate the futility of forming pathological hypotheses while the electro-physiology of the cortex is still in such an undeveloped state."

  54. More narrowly, as we have seen, we also need to think about a tradition of electromechanical modelling in experimental psychology, Pavlovian behaviorism,Walter's specific interest in EEG research, and so on—and, indeed, World War II appears in this story, too, though not as the key element which it was for Wiener.

  55. Chlorpromazine was approved for sale under the name Thorazine by the U.S. FDA in May 1954, and Starks and Braslow (2005, 182) provide revealing statistics on the use of different therapeutic regimes before and after this date at Stockton State Hospital, California's oldest mental institution. "In fact, antipsychotic drugs proved so effective in therapeutically eliminating recalcitrant, hostile, and violent behaviors that lobotomy disappeared almost overnight." Up to 1953, 63% of psychotic patients were treated with ECT; after that, 9% received ECT only, 28% a combination of ECT and drugs, and 47% drugs only.

  56. This work might be described as subcybernetic, since it thematized performance but not necessarily adaptation. Often, though, performance and adaptation turn out to be entangled in the developments at issue, so I will not dwell on this distinction in what follows. As mentioned below, for example,Walter's understanding of yogic feats depended on a notion of willful cerebral adaptation to otherwise autonomous bodily functions; likewise, his interpretation of the effects of flicker went back to the idea of scanning as a modality of adaptation to the world. I should mention that a curiosity about more mundane performances also characterized the early years of cybernetics. Norbert Wiener and Kenneth Craik were both intensely interested in how human beings operated complex tracking and gun-aiming systems (Galison 1994; Craik 1947), while Borck (2000) describes the origins of cybernetics in German aviation medicine inWorldWar II. Again, adaptation was a key feature of this work—to the swerving of a target aircraft, or to the novel conditions of flight in high-performance aircraft.

  57. Berger's pioneering EEG work was itself inspired by an interest in finding a physiological basis for psychic performances such as telepathy (Robbins 2000, 18; Borck 2001). Walter (1953, 269) also floated a more generic conception of an altered state: "Amplified by understanding of the basic functions involved, the physiological training of unusual brains may have results that are quite unforeseeable. We are so accustomed to mediocrity . . . that we can scarcely conceive of the intellectual power of a brain at full throttle." In fiction this was taken up by Colin Wilson in relation to his idea that humanity has thus far failed to exploit anything but a small fraction of its mental abilities, and elaborated in relation to all sorts of technologies of the self (below), including psychoactive drugs, sensory deprivation chambers, and EEG machines: see, for example, Wilson (1964, 1971). "My dynamo was suddenly working at full power" (1964, 211).

  58. His discussion of all the items on the list is entirely nonsceptical, with the possible exception of extrasensory perception.

  59. This notion of the brain is central to the distinctive analysis of cognition in autopoietic systems: see Maturana and Varela (1980, 1992).

  60. This discussion of the modern self (like the earlier discussion of modern science) is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive, as a counterpoint to the nonmodern pole that is the focus of interest. On the historical construction of the modern self see, besides Foucault, Rose (1989).

  61. Phenomenologically, the nonmodern forms of selfhood adumbrated by Walter display either a surrender of rational control (madness, nirvana) or a gain in control of performances not recognized in the modern body (yogic feats). For an insightful discussion of technologies of the self that entail a surrender of control (drugs and music), see Gomart and Hennion (1999) and Gomart (2002), who draw upon Jullien's (1999) analysis of Chinese understandings of decentered agency.

  62. It might be that an interest in strange performances was not as suspect in science in the mid-twentieth century as it subsequently became. In 1942, for example,Harvard physiologistWalter B. Cannon (the man who gave homeostasis its name) published an article entitled "Voodoo Death" (Cannon 1942), a topic he had been working on since the 1930s (Dror 2004). On the historical origins of Walter's list, I am struck by its coincidence with the topics and approaches that featured at this time in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research,a society founded in the late nineteenth century for the scientific exploration of psychic phenomena. In the pages of this journal one indeed finds discussions of ESP alongside yogic feats, clairvoyant visions, and so on, and the idiom
of these discussions—seeking scientific explanations of such phenomena in terms of the properties of the brain—is the same as Walter's. Walter in fact joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1962 (having delivered the society's Myers Memorial Lecture in 1960), though I have no concrete evidence to connect him with it before the publication of The Living Brain.Geiger (2003, 40) notes that John Smythies (see below) visited Walter at the Burden, where they "discussed theories about the cause of the flicker experience" (the date of this meeting is not clear), and Smythies published a major article on psi phenomena in the SPR journal in 1951, discussing flicker as a key piece of evidence and citing Walter (J. Smythies 1951). (In the same volume, Smythies's father published an account of witnessing an instance of levitation in India [E. Smythies 1951].) Reports of EEG research into ESP and "mediumistic trance" appeared in the SPR's journal in the early 1950s—Wallwork (1952) and Evans and Osborn (1952), for example—and Wallwork (699) acknowledges assistance in his research from Smythies. The medium who was the subject of these EEG experiments was Eileen Garrett. Garrett knew Smythies, and Geiger (2003, 84–88) argues that Walter's interest in the paranormal was inspired by her (though this seems to refer to the 1960s). Walter attended one of Garrett's parapsychology conferences in 1961, and Garrett took part in one of Walter's experiments which involved the conjunction of flicker and LSD.Walter related Garrett's EEG record to "expectancy waves" (the phenomenon of contingent negative variation, mentioned above), an idea taken up and amplified in the 1970s by ESP researchers Russell Targ and Harold Putth of at the Stanford Research Institute. Stafford Beer is also recorded as a member of the Society for Psychical Research in 1962 and 1971, and George Spencer Brown (chap. 5, n. 25) joined the society as early as 1949 (and held the Perrott Studentship in Psychical Research at Trinity College, Cambrudge, in 1951–52). Despite his 1930 decision to "accept spiritualism" (chap. 4, n. 19), Ashby does not appear to have been a member of the SPR, and neither does Pask. For this information on the society's membership, I thank its secretary, Peter Johnson (email, 19 June 2007).

  63. One difference between Huxley and Walter has to do with first-person experience. Walter's stance was "scientific" inasmuch as he simply treated it as a matter of observable fact that people had visions, experienced hallucinations, and so on. In The Doors of Perception,Huxley offers a lyrical phenomenological account of what it is like to experience the world after ingesting mescaline. Another contrast is that Walter's scientific explanations of altered states usually hinged on the electrical properties of the brain, whereas Huxley's science was largely chemical.

  64. On the history of the electronic stroboscope see Wildes and Lindgren (1985, chap. 8). "Looking" at a strobe with closed eyes reduces dazzle and homogenizes the ilumination of the retina; also, as mentioned earlier, the alpha rhythms of the brain are typically present when the eyes are closed but disappear when they are open. Adrian and Matthews (1934, 378) discussed the effects of flicker in their pioneering paper on the alpha rhythms of the brain, and observed that if the light is too bright, "the [visual] field may become filled with coloured patterns, the sensation is extremely unpleasant and no regular waves are obtained."Walter's 1938 report to the Rockefeller Foundation mentions attempts "to 'drive' the alpha rhythms with a flickering light" (4), but these were abandoned because of technical difficulties with the apparatus.

  65. Walter's early technical publications on flicker were Walter, Dovey, and Shipton (1946), Walter and Walter (1949), and Walter (1956b). Norbert Wiener offered a mathematical analysis of flicker in the second edition of Cyberneticsin terms of "frequency pulling," offering the synchronization of firefly flashing and the coupling of alternating electrical generators as examples of related phenomena. He also mentioned experiments in Germany, in which subjects were exposed to electrical fields alternating around the alpha frequency, where the effect was reported to be "very disturbing" (Wiener 1961, 197–202).

  66. "The moment such diagreeable sensations were reported the flicker was of course turned off; recruitment of normal volunteers is not encouraged by stories of convulsions which also might unjustly impair the good repute of electroencephalography as a harmless experience" (Walter 1953, 97).

  67. Evans was a Welsh novelist who suffered from epilepsy and attended the Burden Neurological Institute for treatment, where a romance developed between her and Frederick Golla (Hayward 2002). Besides moving patterns, Walter (1953, 250) mentions the induction of "vivid visual hallucination: 'a procession of little men with their hats pulled down over their eyes, marching diagonally across the field.' "

  68. I am grateful to Rhodri Hayward for telling me of this work, and even more so to Geiger for sending me a copy when it was still unavailable outside Canada.

  69. The key figures in British research were Humphrey Osmond, a psychiatrist, and John Smythies (n. 62 above), a qualified doctor with a PhD in neuro-anatomy (Geiger 2003, 27–45). Osmond coined the words "hallucinogen" and "psychedelic" and provided Huxley with the famous 0.4 g of mescaline, the effects of which Huxley described in The Doors of Perception.Osmond's work on LSD led to his involvement with the CIA and MI6, "which were interested in LSD as a possible 'truth drug' to make enemy agents reveal secrets" (Tanne 2004).Heims (1991, 167–68, 224–30) discusses parallel research in the United States, where the psychologist Heinrich Klüver was a key figure and a regular participant in the Macy cybernetics conferences. Heims again discusses the CIA's interest in "mind control" drugs, especially LSD, and possibilities of "behaviour modification," and notes that in the 1950s "the Macy Foundation was for a time used as a conduit for CIA money designated for LSD research." The key figure here was Frank Fremont-Smith, who organized both the cybernetics conferences and three other conference series which "brought leading contractors for CIA-sponsored drug work together with government people concerned with its application." Fremont-Smith thus had an early opportunity to try out LSD for himself.

  70. Burroughs connected the effects of flicker to Walter's explorations of synesthetic overflow between different areas of the brain (Geiger 2003, 47; Walter 1953, 72).

  71. Geiger (2003, 49): "Sommerville had also read The Living Brain,and he and Burroughs sought out Walter, attending a lecture and speaking with him afterwards."

  72. There are many echoes of Walter's work in Burroughs's early masterpiece Naked Lunch(2001 [1959]). In the section entitled "benway," for example, Dr. Benway is described as "an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control," who uses various regimes of Walter-Pavlov-style cross-conditioning to reduce the population of Annexia not to madness, but to gibbering docility. Burroughs invents a technology of the self called the "Switchboard" for this purpose: "Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject's teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the Switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine" (21–22). Immediately after the description of the Switchboard, Benway offers the opinion quoted in part in chapter 1, that "the study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods," and he continues with a classically Walterian, if fictional, materialist account of the phenomenology of cocaine that I quoted in chapter 1: "Ever pop coke in the mainline? It hits you right in the brain, activating connections of pure pleasure. . . . C is electricity through the brain, and the C yen is of the brain alone, a need without body and without feeling. The C-charged brain is a berserk pinball machine, flashing blue and pink lights in electric orgasm. C pleasure could be felt by a thinking machine, the first hideous stirrings of insect life. . . . Of course the effect of C could be produced by an electric current activating the C channels." One thinks of the mirror and mating dances of Walter's tortoises souped up with random jolts of current surging thr
ough their rudimentary neurons, now as a materialist model for getting high.

  73. Geiger (2003, 55–61). In The Politics of Ecstasy(1970) Leary also discusses Walter's work with implanted electrodes and the manipulation of consciousness.

  74. Geiger (2003, 64, 67, 91, 95 97) mentions exhibitions in Paris (the first), Rome (1962, where Gysin constructed his Chapel of Extreme Experience), Tangiers (1964), and Basel (1979, the opening attended by Burroughs and Albert Hofmann, the chemist who synthesized LSD in 1938). Beyond the immediate orbit of the Beats, the 1963 Living City exhibition at the ICA in London was lit by a flicker machine (Sadler 2005, 55–57). This exhibition was put on by the Archigram group of architects, who will reappear in chapter 7. In 1979, the Pompidou Centre acquired a Dream Machine for its permanent collection. Gysin died in Paris in July 1986, but the Dream Machine continued to appear in exhibitions: in Los Angeles in 1996, and at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2000.

  75. The story of flicker machines as consumer goods does not end in the sixties. In January 2005, under the headline "Décor by Timothy Leary, Dreams by You," the New York Times reported that David Woodard, a California composer and conductor, had made and sold more than a thousand Dreamachines since the early nineties, based on Gysin's original templates (Allen 2005). On first exposure to a Dreamachine, the reporter saw "colorful undulating patterns"; on his second experience he had visions of a campfire in a forest and a large auditorium, and had sensations of following someone down a basement hallway and of sharing his visions with someone else in the room (who was not there). The association with the counterculture continues: the Dream Machine in question belonged to Kate Chapman, "a former neuroscience researcher for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies." One can also buy commercially produced flicker glasses today, consisting of LEDs mounted inside the frame of a pair of sunglasses. The flash rate of the LEDs is electronically controlled and can be programmed to flash at different rates in different sequences. I thank David Lambert for lending me his glasses. I enjoyed using them very much. I saw only moving geometric patterns, but I was struck by the objective quality of the images and their aesthetic appeal, and also by visceral sensations akin to falling when the flicker frequency changed. My son Alex tried them out, with no background explanation from me, and immediately said, "I can see people playing table tennis." (The glasses I tried are made by Synetic Systems International: www.syneticsystems.com.)