The Ratio Club

From left to right;
standing: Giles Brindley, Harold Shipton, Tom McClardy, John Bates,
Ross Ashby, Edmund Hick, Thomas Gold, John Pringle, Donald
Sholl, Albert Uttley, John Westcott, Donald MacKay;
sitting: Alan Turing, Gurney Sutton, William Rushton, George Dawson, Horace Barlow

The British physiologist William Grey Walter (1910–1977) was an early member of the interdisciplinary Ratio Club. This was a small dining club that met several times a year from 1949 to 1955, with a nostalgic
final meeting in 1958, at London’s National Hospital for Neurological Diseases. The founder-secretary was the neurosurgeon John Bates, who had worked (alongside the psychologist Kenneth Craik) on servomechanisms for gun turrets during the war.

The club was a pioneering source of ideas in what Norbert Wiener had recently dubbed ‘cybernetics’ Indeed, Bates’ archive shows that the letter inviting membership spoke of ‘people who had Wiener’s ideas before Wiener’s book appeared’. In fact, its founders had considered calling it the Craik Club, in memory of Craik’s work—not least, his stress on ‘synthetic’ models of psychological theories. In short, the club was the nucleus of a thriving British tradition of cybernetics, started independently of the transatlantic version.

The Ratio members—about twenty at any given time—were a very carefully chosen group. Several of them had been involved in wartime signals research or intelligence work at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing had used primitive computers to decipher the Nazis’ Enigma code. They were drawn from a wide range of disciplines: clinical psychiatry and neurology, physiology, neuroanatomy, mathematics/statistics, physics, astrophysics, and the new areas of control engineering and computer science.

The aim was to discuss novel ideas: their own, and those of guests—such as Warren McCulloch. Indeed, McCulloch—the prime author, a few years earlier, of what became the seminal paper in cognitive science (McCulloch and Pitts 1943)—was their very first speaker in December 1949. (Bates and Donald MacKay, who’d hatched the idea of the club on a shared train journey after visiting Grey Walter, knew that McCulloch was due to visit England and timed the first meeting accordingly.) Turing himself gave a guest talk on Educating a Digital Computer exactly a year later, and soon became a member. (His other talk to the club was on morphogenesis.) Professors were barred, to protect the openness of speculative discussion. So the imaginative anatomist J. Z. Young (who’d discovered the squid’s giant neurones, and later suggested the ‘selective’ account of learning) couldn’t join the club, but gave a talk as a guest.

The club’s archives contain a list of thirty possible discussion topics drawn up by Ashby (Owen Holland p.c.). Virtually all of these are still current. What’s more, if one ignores the details, they can’t be better answered now than they could in those days. These wide-ranging meetings were enormously influential, making intellectual waves that are still spreading in various areas of cognitive science. The neurophysiologist Horace Barlow (p.c.) now sees them as crucial for his own intellectual development, in leading him to think about the nervous system in terms of information theory.  And Giles Brindley, another important neuroscientist, who was brought along as a guest by Barlow before joining for a short time, also remembers them as hugely exciting occasions.  See attached image archived at Wellcome Library, London, of “The Ratio Club” at Cambridge. Fortuitously, the single photo was taken at a Ratio Club meeting held May 2-3, 1952 that was attended by a guest, “Giles Brindley (London Hospital).” Giles is the gent marked by the yellow circle. Also in this group are two pioneers in computer science that are so significant that their names are immediately recognizable: that’s Donald MacKay marked in red and Alan Turing in green.


Reference: http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article020101.html#sdfootnote8sym

Unusual Science Talks: Extreme Show & Tell

In doing a little research on history of visual prostheses, I uncovered a gem, Sir Giles Skey Brindley (an account paraphrased from the sources below).

A rather diverse fellow, he made significant contributions to cortical prostheses in the 1960s, but perhaps even more noteworthy was his later work in the 80s on penile dysfunction and various cures. This culminated in a rather unusual scientific presentation at the 1983 Las Vegas meeting of the American Urological Association.

The lecture, which had an innocuous title along the lines of ‘Vaso-active therapy for erectile dysfunction’ was scheduled as an evening lecture of the Urodynamics Society. Professor Brindley, still in his blue track suit, was introduced as a psychiatrist with broad research interests. He began his lecture without aplomb. He had, he indicated, hypothesized that injection with vasoactive agents into the corporal bodies of the penis might induce an erection. Lacking ready access to an appropriate animal model, and cognisant of the long medical tradition of using oneself as a research subject, he began a series of experiments on self-injection of his penis with various vasoactive agents, including papaverine, phentolamine, and several others. (While this is now commonplace, at the time it was unheard of). His slide-based talk consisted of a large series of photographs of his penis in various states of tumescence after injection with a variety of doses of phentolamine and papaverine. The Professor wanted to make his case in the most convincing style possible. He indicated that, in his view, no normal person would find the experience of giving a lecture to a large audience to be erotically stimulating or erection-inducing. He had, he said, therefore injected himself with papaverine in his hotel room before coming to give the lecture, and deliberately wore loose clothes (hence the track-suit) to make it possible to exhibit the results. He stepped around the podium, and pulled his loose pants tight up around his genitalia in an attempt to demonstrate his erection.

At this point, I, and I believe everyone else in the room, was agog. I could scarcely believe what was occurring on stage. But Prof. Brindley was not satisfied. He looked down sceptically at his pants and shook his head with dismay. ‘Unfortunately, this doesn’t display the results clearly enough’. He then summarily dropped his trousers and shorts, revealing a long, thin, clearly erect penis. There was not a sound in the room. Everyone had stopped breathing. But the mere public showing of his erection from the podium was not sufficient. He paused, and seemed to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable. He then said, with gravity, ‘I’d like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence’. With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs, approaching (to their horror) the urologists and their partners in the front row. As he approached them, erection waggling before him, four or five of the women in the front rows threw their arms up in the air, seemingly in unison, and screamed loudly. The scientific merits of the presentation had been overwhelmed, for them, by the novel and unusual mode of demonstrating the results.

References:

1. How (not) to communicate new scientific information: a memoir of the famous Brindley lecture. DOI: 10.1111/j.1464-410X.2005.05797.x
2. Professor Giles Brindley – Extreme Show & Tell February 15, 2010.
3. Brindley GS. Cavernosal alpha-blockade: a new technique for investigating and treating erectile impotence. Br J Psychiatry (1983) 143: 332–337.