> I need to say more about cybernetics, the brain, and psychiatry. The early cybernetics of Walter and Ashby directly concerned the brain as an anatomical organ. The tortoise and the homeostat where intended as electromechanical models of the physiological brain, normal and pathological, with the latter proving a direct link to the brutal approaches to psychiatry that were dominant from the 1930s to the 1950s, chemical and electrical shock therapies and lobotomy. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, a different form of cybernetic psychiatry emerged, often, though somewhat misleading, labeled "anti-psychiatry" for its opposition to violent interventions in mental illness (and, indeed for its opposition to the concept of mental illness). Pickering (2010) The Cybernetic Brain