This is the Proceedings of a symposium on the 'Cyber- netics of the nervous system' held as part of the Second International Meeting of Medical Cybernetics in April 1962.The contributions are primarily addressed to the explication of models representing a rather wider range of biological processes than is immediately suggested by the title.Many of the papers are strictly speaking con- cemed with purely psychological topics.The bridge be- tween psychology and neurophysiology is provided by several authors in the form of the fashionable 'nerve nets'.Thus Cowan briefly describes his mathematical studies of the problem of error-free computation by a network subject to local random failures.Braitenberg points out the limitations of electrophysiological recording and shows how histological evidence may yield insight into the functioning of large networks.Ashby and his co- workers investigate possible pathological correlates of the oscillatory activity which characterizes the simpler hypothetical networks.At a more behavioural level, the substitution of 'in- formation-processing logarithm' for the more familiar 'conditioned reflex' is an integral part of Napalkov's work in Moscow: he describes experiments on artificiallyinduced hypertension which he wishes to explain in terms of models derived from American studies in artificial intelligence.That is, he wishes to view behaviour in terms of a programme functionally organized into levels defined by different degrees of detail in the information that is being processed.Such an approach must be backed up by implementation on a digital computer, which Napalkov so far seems not to have done.With the possible exception of papers by Frank and Muller on the associative networks 'Lernen-matrizen', the symposium did not adequately reflect the current development in the use of computational techniques to model complex operations such as must be performed in the nervous system.Indeed several papers perpetuate the pseudophilosophical approach which characterized the early
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B. Hughes (1964) studied this question.