1 84 Information Storage and Neural Control 



you much today. Certain aspects, however, are conspicuous 

 enough to be worth mentioning. First, it seems that such deep 

 clianges and the processes by which they occur are almost in- 

 variably cloaked with unconsciousness and with amnesia. The 

 ability of any couple to tell you what it really was that they went 

 through in courtship is approximately zero. They can tell you 

 dates, times, and places. They may be able to identify a single 

 striking episode, something that he did or she did which struck 

 the other with a moment's flash; but, in general, such processes are 

 not subject to recall and have not been investigated. Wliile there 

 is a great deal of fantasy about courtship, there is, as a matter of 

 fact, no recorded data regarding it in any culture of the world. 

 Similarly, the patient and the therapist are both virtually 

 unable to tell you what happened that led to psychotherapeutic 

 change. Theories are many; fantasies are many; recipes are many 

 and are always unsatisfactory. It is not too much to say that this 

 is a region of almost total scientific ignorance. I believe, however, 

 that it has to be analyzed, has to be studied, and will be studied 

 in the next twenty years, and that in this study, the branch of 

 information theory dealing with patterns of patterns, redundancies 

 about redundancies, will be a central tool. 



REFERENCES 



1. Attneave, Fred: Applications of Information Theory to Psychology, New 



York, Henry Holt and Co., 1959. 



2. Bateson, Gregory: Morale and national character, in, Civilian Morale, 



2nd Yearbook of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social 

 Issues, edited by Goodwin Watson, New York, Houghton Mifflin 

 and Co., 1942, p. 71. 



3. Travers, P. L.: Mary Poppins, New York, Reynal and Hitchcock, 



1934, p. 121. 



DISCUSSION OF CHAPTER VIII 



Herman Blustein (Chicago, Illinois): Doesn't an adequate 

 communication system actually preclude the knowledge of the 

 rules of the game by both communicators and receptors of the 

 communication system? 



