356 Information Storage and Neural Control 



letter and turning up one at the word you spell out o-n-e — one; 

 the ace appears: t-w-o — two, the two is turned; and so on, right 

 through the deck, ending with the last two cards of the last suit. 

 Examination of the cards as they have been ordered in the deck 

 so as to give this functional output, which recreates the structural 

 order of the original package, reveals nothing" at all; the deck 

 seems to be completely messed up. 



Either kind of order is produced by some operation of the 

 environment on tlie system, on the deck of cards; and the amount 

 of information contained in it, in the technical sense, is a matter 

 of how well we know the rules that produced that particular 

 order. If, for example, one gives the value of tt to many hundreds 

 of digits, the number of bits needed to transmit it would increase 

 without limit at the rate of over three bits per digit. But if the 

 formula for calculating tt is given, very few bits are needed for 

 a limitless number of digits. 



I suggest that one sees structural order quite easily and recognizes 

 the rule almost intuitively; whereas, one does not see functional 

 order nearly so easily nor tumble at once to the rule. But when 

 we do find the rule, the information collapses and we no longer 

 have the element of surprise. Certainly the whole history of scien- 

 tific development has followed such lines. In every area we have 

 recognized structural elements, structural entities, and regularities 

 long before we have paid attention to functional ones. 



Turning now to organisms in this connection, stored information 

 need not require any expenditure of energy. It may, of course, 

 if storage is dynamic, but it need not, as in the structural storage 

 of books or pictures. Information flow does take energy, but 

 negligible amounts will ordinarily suffice. One can think, in 

 organisms, of an overall structural information, seen in the total 

 morphology that has been built up. This is what Patten was 

 concerned with in his study of the morphology of an ecosystem, 

 a kind of epiorganism. This is of interest per se to the anatomist, 

 the structuralist; but to the behaviorist, the physiologist, it is of 

 interest more in terms of what it can yield as patterned behavior. 

 If the system is suddenly made unable to behave, if it is killed, 

 most of this information remains present, at least for a time, but 

 it is no longer of any functional use or interest. In a way, what 



