Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior: The Hixon Symposium

Edited by Lloyd A. Jeffress. (New York: John Wiley & Sons; London: Chapman & Hall, 1951. Pp. xiv + 311. 52 s.)

Design for a Brain. By W. Ross Ashby. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1952. Pp. x + 260. 36 s.)

Mind, Life and Body. By Reginald O. Kapp. (London: Constable, 1951. Pp. xviii + 196. 12 s. 6 d.)

The Hixon Symposium consists of a number of papers given to a small distinguished group together with the recorded discussions of them. It thus resembles the published discussions of cybernetics that have taken place of recent years in the United States. It is concerned broadly with the same theme, but it is much the most important volume of its kind.

Professor von Neumann opens with an excellent account of electronic computers, showing what we may reasonably expect to be able to do with them. He discusses, for instance, the conditions in which an automaton could reproduce itself. On the whole, interested though he is in the analogies between computers and organisms, he is more concerned here to point out certain significant differences. Professor McCulloch follows with an interesting treatment of the analogies between computers and the central nervous system, with the aim of showing that anything operating according to the principles of the digital computer is necessarily able to do such things as remembering. (He does not, unfortunately, make it explicit that he is referring not to memory itself but to the mechanisms that are the physiological counterparts of memory; and his title, 'Why the Mind is in the Head' seems to have little connexion with his subject.) Professor Lashley then gives an admirable paper entitled 'The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior'. The organization of many phenomena that take a certain length of time to develop, such as uttering a sentence or trotting on four legs, he argues, cannot be explained in terms of successions of external stimuli. There are almost no physiological explanations for these neglected phenomena. There is