Argument

Every new level achieved by technology attracted the attention of physiologists and turned their thoughts in a new direction; they often unwittingly modeled life processes in the image of contemporary engineering achievements.

–(Nikolay Bernshteyn [1958] 1997, 392)

This article reinterprets the debate between orthodox followers of the Pavlovian reflex theory and Soviet “cybernetic physiologists” in the 1950s and 60s as a clash of opposing man-machine metaphors. While both sides accused each other of “mechanistic,” reductionist methodology, they did not see anything “mechanistic” about their own central metaphors: the telephone switchboard metaphor for nervous activity (the Pavlovians), and the analogies between the human body and a servomechanism and between the human brain and a computer (the cyberneticians). I argue that the scientific utility of machine analogies was closely intertwined with their philosophical and political meanings and that new interpretations of these metaphors emerged as a result of political conflicts and a realignment of forces within the scientific community and in society at large. I suggest that the constant travel of man-machine analogies back and forth between physiology and technology has blurred the traditional categories of the “mechanistic” and the “organic” in Soviet neurophysiology, as perhaps in the history of physiology in general.