Ebook: Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future

Acknowledgments; 1. The Adaptive Brain; 2. Ontological Theater; Part 1: Psychiatry to Cybernetics; 3. Grey Walter: From Electroshock to the Psychedelic Sixties; 4. Ross Ashby: Psychiatry, Synthetic Brains, and Cybernetics; 5. Gregory Bateson and R.D. Laing: Symmetry, Psychiatry, and the Sixties; Part 2: Beyond the Brain ; 6. Stafford Beer: From the Cybernetic Factory to Tantric Yoga; 7. Gordon Pask: From Chemical Computers to Adaptive Archictecture; 8. Sketches of Another Future; Notes; References; Index.;Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present. The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R.D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the s.