CHAPTER 17 



Ancillary Regulations 



17/1. Our study of adaptation has led us to the ultrastable 

 system, and then to some difficulties, in S. 11/2, about how long 

 an ultrastable system would take to get adapted. These diffi- 

 culties have been largely resolved by our identification of the 

 multistable system. (This is not to say that the topic of adapta- 

 tion is exhausted, for it extends to innumerable special cases that 

 deserve particular study.) In this chapter and the next we will 

 consider some other objections that may be raised to the thesis 

 that the brain is to a major degree multistable. In dealing with 

 them we shall encounter some new aspects of the subject that are 

 worthy of attention. 



Communication within the brain 



17/2. If it is accepted from here onwards that the formulation 

 of S. 16/6 and its Figure (the multistable system) solves, at least 

 in its major features, the problem posed in Chapter 1, there arises 

 the question why Figure 16/6/1 shows, in the lower part (the 

 organism), no joins between subsystem and subsystem. Does not 

 this absence make the representation a travesty of the facts ? — 

 a brain with no communication between its parts ! 



17/3. In this matter let us dispose once for all of the idea, 

 fostered in almost every book on the brain written in the last 

 century, that the more communication there is within the brain 

 the better. It will suffice if we remember the three following ways 

 in which we have already seen that some function can be success- 

 ful only if certain pairs of variables are not allowed to communicate, 

 or between which the communication must not be allowed to 

 increase beyond a certain degree. 



(1) In S. 8/15 we saw that when an organism is adapting by 

 discrete trials, the essential variables must" change the step- 

 mechanisms at a rate much slower than the rate at which the 



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