The title of the book, The Brain as a Computer, is intended to convey something of the methodology involved; the idea is to regard the brain itself a… - Frank Honywill George

These computing machines had already been designed, and some built, by Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, and others, and were almost ready-made for the job. These scientists, as well as others such as von Neumann, Shannon and Bigelow, were in a position to see that machines of an electronic kind were ideally suited to carry out the whole of the operations of range-finding and location without any human intervention whatever. These electronic computing machines were already developed to a very high degree of efficiency for the solution of mathematical equations, and some technical difficulties had led to the suggestion that a process of scanning, similar to that used in television, might be incorporated into the computer. Another innovation was the use of binary notation rather than decimal notation as in the early computer.

In many ways it is true to say that syntax is mathematical logic, semantics is philosophy or philosophy of science, and pragmatics is psychology, but these fields are not really all distinct.

This book an attempt will be made to outline the principles of cybernetics and relate them to what we know of behaviour, both from the point of view of experimental psychology and also from the point of view of neurophysiology.