Design for a Brain

Ashby’s book-length argument that adaptive behavior — in an animal’s nervous system or a machine — is the behavior of an ultrastable system: one that responds to a disturbance not by a fixed corrective reflex but by reorganizing its own internal parameters until a stable, viable state is found again. Developed from the theoretical basis of his 1948 homeostat, the book gives adaptation a formal, mechanism-independent treatment — a foundation for describing brains, animals, and self-regulating machines in the same terms. First published by Chapman & Hall in 1952; this scan is the revised second edition (Wiley / Chapman & Hall, 1960).