Computers and the Human Mind.

By 1948, with computation science freed from wartime demands, a new ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, 1946 area of scientific research had emerged. Cybernetics, a word coined by mathematician Norbert Wiener, attempts to find common elements in the functioning of automatic machines and that of the human nervous system. He chose the name cybernetics, taken from the Greek word meaning "steersman," because of the importance in the nervous system of control or feedback mechanisms, which he likened to the steering engine of a ship. Cybernetics brought together collaborators from diverse fields, including John Von Neumann, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; physiologist Warren McCulloch of the University of Pennsylvania; Kurt Lewin, a psychologist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and husband and wife anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. In studying the workings of the new computers...