Word: feedbacks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...University of Illinois last week, Dr. Grant Fairbanks was having a fine time with a fiendish apparatus specially designed to turn sane human beings into temporary gibbering idiots. It does the dirty work by the cybernetic trick of tinkering with the "feedback" system that monitors human speech...
...methods of cybernetics (the science of control mechanism) is to look for similarities between the human nervous system and the brighter man-made machines. One of these is the feedback: some means by which either the brain or a machine keeps track of what it has accomplished. Without proper feed-back apparatus a ship-steering mechanism, for instance, does not know how much it has succeeded in turning the ship. Therefore it cannot decide accurately when to stop turning. It is likely to send the ship into wild zigzags...
Reports on Speech. Most human feedback systems are built into the nerves or into the brain itself, where they cannot easily be tinkered with. The feed-back of speech is more accessible. The brain normally keeps track of speech by means of reports, which it gets through the ears and by bone conduction, upon the pronunciation of each syllable. As each report arrives, the brain tells the vocal apparatus to go ahead and speak the next syllable. The whole thing happens so rapidly and smoothly that the speaker is rarely conscious...