Psychiatry, synthetic brains and cybernetics in the work of W. Ross Ashby

Abstract

This essay focuses on the historical development of W. Ross Ashby's work up to the late 1950s. Two key landmarks are Ashby's most famous machine, the homeostat, and the book in which it featured, Design for a Brain. The essay explores constitutive connections between Ashby's cybernetics and his professional interest in psychiatry and the brain, his quest to build a synthetic brain and the DAMS project, and his subsequent development of cybernetics as a general theory of machines.

Keywords:

• W. Ross Ashby
• cybernetics
• the brain
• psychiatry
• theory of machines

Acknowledgements

I thank Peter Asaro for many illuminating discussions on the history of cybernetics and Ashby's work in particular, as well as for help with the literature and sources, and Steve Sturdy and Malcolm Nicolson for much needed assistance with the history of medicine. Much of the research for this paper was carried out as a sabbatical visitor to the Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 2002–2003, with partial support from NSF grant number 0094504. I am grateful to everyone at the Unit, especially the Director, David Bloor, for their hospitality and scholarly input.

Notes

^1. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the W. Ross Ashby Centenary Conference, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 4–6 March 2004. For a more extensive analysis of the history, philosophy and sociology of Ashby's cybernetics, see Pickering (forthcoming).

^2. On Walter. see Hayward (2001a, 2001b) and Pickering (2004, forthcoming). The connection in American cybernetics is powerfully brought out in fiction in Wolfe (1952).

^3. He received the MB, BCh degrees from St Bartholomews Hospital in 1928 and the MD degree in 1935, the same year in which he was awarded an MA from Cambridge.

^4. For two somewhat different accounts of Ashby's departure from the Burden, see Beer (1960) and Cooper and Bird (1989).

^5. On this school in Britain and Golla and Walter in particular, see Hayward (2001a, 2001b, 2004).

^6. There is an interesting parallel here with the work of Walter Freeman in the USA. After extensive unsuccessful attempts to identify organic correlates in the brain of insanity, Freeman went on to become one of the key figures in the development of lobotomy: Pressman (1998, pp. 73–77).

^7. Various chemical shock techniques were introduced from 1933 onwards; lobotomy was introduced as a psychosurgical technique by Egan Moniz in 1935; ECT first appeared in 1938: Valenstein (1986) and Pressman (1998).

^8. The description of this work as a hobby appears in a letter from Ashby's wife to Mai von Foerster, 5 August 1973 in the BCL archive of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ref. S.N. 11/6/26; B.N. 1. Much of the early foundational work in British cybernetics was done outside professional settings, including that of Grey Walter, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask: see Pickering (forthcoming).

^9. Hayward (2001a, 2001b, 2004), Pickering (2004).

^10. ‘Man does not think logically – he thinks dynamically’ (Ashby 1951, p. 7).

^11. Rosenblueth et al. (1943). Mindell (2002) traces the historical connection between brains and servomechanisms back beyond Wiener's work to World War I; Cordeschi (2002) likewise traces the construction of electromechanical models of brain functions back to the early twentieth century in experimental psychology.

^12. Letter from BBC to Ashby, 21 February 1949. I thank Jill Ashby for providing me with a list of the newspaper cuttings that her father preserved in his notebooks.

^13. Read to a Royal Medico-Psychological Association meeting in Gloucester (presumably at Barnwood House) in July 1953.

^14. I can add two more for the sake of completeness. First, the essay suggests a quite new general understanding of mental illness. Ashby (1954, p. 123) here supposes that there exist in the brain homeostatic regulators ancillary to the cortex itself, and that mental pathologies might be due to faults in the ancillary systems. He argues that if that were the case,

We would see that the details of the patient's behaviour were essentially normal, for the details were determined by an essentially normal cortex, but we would find that the general tenor was essentially abnormal, a caricature of some recognisable temperament… Thus we might see the healthy person's ability to think along new and original lines exaggerated to the incomprehensible bizarreness of the schizophrenic and likewise for the maniac and the melancholic.

Second, Ashby returns to the question of the organic basis for mental illness, but from a distinctively cybernetic angle. This hinged, in the first instance, on the idea of essential variables. In the homeostat, these were the currents running through the needles, which caused the relays to trip when they exceeded some threshold value. Ashby had already suggested that biological limits on essential variables were set by heredity and here he supposed that sometimes heredity would go wrong. He mentioned a child born unable to feel pain, who thus ‘injures himself seriously and incessantly’, and imagined that ‘the mental defective who is self-mutilating… may be abnormal in the same way’ (1954, p. 121).

^15. Ashby notebook entry 3 November 1958, pp. 6060–6062. Incidentally, the previous page to this entry records that ‘Here came the Great Translation, from a person at B.H. to Director at B.N.I. (Appointment, but no more till May 59.)’ It appears that habituation was a key topic for Ashby in the 1950s, which loomed so large because (1) he could demonstrate it both abstractly and with DAMS, and (2) it connected straight to electroshock. This is perhaps the best example of the unity of his synthetic brain and psychiatric projects. Ashby's principal contribution to the major Mechanisation of Thought Processes conference in 1958 was a paper on ‘The mechanism of habituation’ (Ashby 1959a). It includes an extended discussion of de-habituation (1959a, p. 109ff) without ever mentioning electroshock, including the phenomenon of spontaneous recovery (1959a, p. 111). At the same meeting, Ashby also exhibited ‘A simple computer for demonstrating behaviour’ (Ashby 1959b). According to its settings, Ashby claimed that it could display ‘Over forty well known pieces of biological behaviour’ including various simple reflexes, ‘accumulation of drive’, ‘displacement activity’, and ‘conflict leading to oscillation’ or ‘compromise’. As exhibited it was set to show ‘Conflict leading to catatonia, with protection and cure’ (1959b, pp. 947–948).

^16. Ashby's last three empirical publications on psychiatry appeared between 1959 and 1961 and in fact reported on clinical trials of various drugs (Ashby 1959c, Ashby et al. 1960, Ashby and Collins 1961) but offered no cybernetic interpretation of their mode of action.

^17. For the cybernetic connection via Gregory Bateson to antipsychiatry and the psychedelic 1960s, see Pickering (2004, forthcoming).

^18. While most of Ashby's discussions of state-determined machines can be seen as integral to the development of his cybernetics and psychiatry, this letter to Nature has to be seen as part of a strategy to draw attention to his work recorded in his notebook in early June 1944 (p. 1666):

My plan is to write articles on political & economic organisation to try and make a stir there, knowing that then I can say that it is all based on my neuro-physiology. Another line is to watch for some dogmatic statement which I can flatly contradict in public, the bigger the authority who makes it the better.

Of course, that he even thought about applying his mathematical analysis to economics is enough to illustrate the instability of its referent.

^19. Like Design, Introduction to Cybernetics displays no interest in psychiatry, apart from a remarkable paragraph at the end of the Preface. After thanking the governors of Barnwood House and Dr G.W.T.H. Fleming for their support, Ashby (1956, p. vii) continues:

Though the book covers many topics, these are but means; the end has been throughout to make clear what principles must be followed when one attempts to restore normal function to a sick organism that is, as a human patient, of fearful complexity. It is my faith that the new understanding may lead to new and effective treatments, for the need is great.