r_42/43/44, Your Key to a Better Life_How Your Brain Finds Answers to Problems

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POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of
GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020
Copyright © 1960 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Published by arrangement with Prentice-Hall, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 07632
ISBN: 0-671-80628-9
First Pocket Books printing May, 1969
33rd printing
Trademarks registered in the United States and other countries.
Printed in the U.S.A.

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PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS

Your Key to a Better Life

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When "YOU" select the goal and trigger it into action,
an automatic mechanism takes over. First of all, you have
DISCOVERING YOUR SUCCESS MECHANISM 21
picked up cigarettes, or performed similar movements before.
Your automatic mechanism has "learned" something
of the correct response needed. Next, your automatic
mechanism uses feedback data furnished to the brain by
your eyes, which tells it "the degree to which the cigarettes
are not picked up." This feedback data enables the
automatic mechanism to continually correct the motion
of your hand, until it is steered to the cigarettes.
In a baby, just learning to use its muscles, the correction
of the hand in reaching for a rattle is very obvious.
The baby has little "stored information" to draw upon.
Its hand zigzags back and forth and gropes obviously as
it reaches. It is characteristic of all learning that as learning
takes place, correction becomes more and more refined.
We see this in a person just learning to drive a car,
who "over-corrects" and zigzags back and forth across
the street.
Once, however, a correct or "successful response" has
been accomplished—it is "remembered" for future use.
The automatic mechanism then duplicates this successful
response on future trials. It has "learned" how to respond
successfully. It "remembers" its successes, forgets its
failures, and repeats the successful action without any further
conscious "thought"—or as a habit.

How Your Brain Finds Answers to Problems

 
Now let us suppose that the room is dark so that you
cannot see the cigarettes. You know, or hope, there is a
package of cigarettes on the table, along with a variety of
other objects. Instinctively, your hand will begin to
"grope" back and forth, performing zigzag motions (or
"scanning") rejecting one object after another, until the
cigarettes are found and "recognized." This is an example
of the second type of servo-mechanism. Recalling a
name temporarily forgotten is another example. A "Scanner"
in your brain scans back through your stored memories
until the correct name is "recognized." An electron22
PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS
ic brain solves problems in much the same way. First of
all, a great deal of data must be fed into the machine.
This stored, or recorded information is the machine's
"memory." A problem is posed to the machine. It scans
back through its memory until it locates the only "answer"
which is consistent with and meets all the conditions of
the problem. Problem and answer together constitute a
"whole" situation or structure. When part of the situation
or structure (the problem) is given to the machine, it
locates the only "missing parts," or the right size brick, so
to speak, to complete the structure.
The more that is learned about the human brain, the
more closely it resembles—insofar as function is concerned
—a servo-mechanism. For example, Dr. Wilder Penfield,
director of the Montreal Neurological Institute, recently
reported at a meeting of the National Academy of
Sciences, that he had discovered a recording mechanism
in a small area of the brain, which apparently records
everything that a person has ever experienced, observed
or learned. During a brain operation in which the patient
was fully awake, Dr. Penfield happened to touch a small
area of the cortex with a surgical instrument. At once the
patient exclaimed that she was "reliving" an incident from
her childhood, which she had consciously forgotten. Further
experiments along this line brought the same results.
When certain areas of the cortex were touched, patients
did not merely "remember" past experiences, they "relived"
them, experiencing as very real all the sights,
sounds and sensations of the original experience. It was
just as if past experiences had been recorded on a tape
recorder and played back. Just how a mechanism as small
as the human brain can store such a vast amount of information
is still a mystery.
British neurophysicist W. Grey Walter has said that at
least ten billion electronic cells would be needed to build
a facsimile of man's brain. These cells would occupy
about a million and a half cubic feet, and several additional
millions of cubic feet would be needed for the
DISCOVERING YOUR SUCCESS MECHANISM 23
"nerves" or wiring. Power required to operate it would
be one billion watts.

A Look at the Automatic Mechanism in Action

We marvel at the awesomeness of interceptor missiles
which can compute in a flash the point of interception of
another missile and "be there" at the correct instant to
make contact.
Yet, are we not witnessing something just as wonderful
each time we see a center fielder catch a fly ball? In order
to compute where the ball will fall, or where the "point
of interception" will be, he must take into account the
speed of the ball, its curvature of fall, its direction, windage,
initial velocity and the rate of progressive decrease
in velocity. He must make these computations so fast that
he will be able to "take off" at the crack of the bat. Next,
he must compute just how fast he must run, and in what
direction in order to arrive at the point of interception at
the same time the ball does. The center fielder doesn't even
think about this. His built-in goal-striving mechanism
computes it for him from data which he feeds it through
his eyes and ears. The computer in his brain takes this information,
compares it with stored data (memories of
other successes and failures in catching fly balls). All
necessary computations are made in a flash and orders
are issued to his leg muscles—and he "just runs."

Science Can Build the Computer but Not the Operator

Dr. Wiener has said that at no time in the foreseeable
future will scientists be able to construct an electronic
brain anywhere near comparable to the human brain. "I
think that our gadget-conscious public has shown an unawareness
of the special advantages and special disadvantages
of electronic machinery, as compared with the
human brain," he says. "The number of switching devices
24 PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS
in the human brain vastly exceeds the number in any
computing machine yet developed, or even thought of for
design in the near future....

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