Journal of Russian & East European Psychology

ISSN: 1061-0405 (Print) 1558-0415 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mrpo20

From Reflex to Model of the Future

N.A. BERNSTEIN

To cite this article: N.A. BERNSTEIN (2006) From Reflex to Model of the Future, Journal of
Russian & East European Psychology, 44:2, 93-98

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-0405440205

Published online: 08 Dec 2014.

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 Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 44, no. 2,
March–April 2006, pp. 93–98.
© 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061–0405/2006 $9.50 + 0.00.

N.A. BERNSTEIN
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From Reflex to Model of

the Future

We are living through a time of the stormy flow of new ideas across the
entire broad range of the life sciences. Both these ideas themselves and
their application to practice are, certainly, fruitful; they substantially
enhance the power of man over living nature. Let us speak briefly here
of a quite young but already highly promising branch of the biological
sciences—the biology and physiology of activeness.
It is widely known and has been described many times how the grow-
ing and increasingly complex demands of production and defense have
led over the past two or three decades to the emergence and flourishing
of a new science—cybernetics, the theory of control and communica-
tion. And while cybernetics, theoretical and applied, rendered brilliant
service to the branches of technology from which it had arisen, it was
noted that at least one of the objects of this science—control—is a phe-
nomenon inherent solely in living nature and nowhere encountered among
nonliving objects, at least for as long as they remain untouched by the
hand of man.
On the one hand, this indisputable proposition immediately proved
extraordinarily useful to cybernetics. For a multitude of problems of
technological control the science of life—biology—was able to suggest
highly expedient solutions, to show engineers the systems of regulation,

English translation © 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2004
Smysl. “Ot refleksa k modeli budushchego,” in Nikolai Bernshtein: ot refleksa k
modeli budushchego, ed. I.M. Feigenberg (Moscow: Smysl, 2004), pp. 233–39.
Translated by Stephen D. Shenfield.
93

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control, and even communication, remarkable in their perfection, pos-

sessed by many representatives of the animal world. A new scientific
trend developed into a special branch of cybernetics—bionics, which
should be defined most precisely as the imitation of living systems and
their use in all kinds of technological devices.
On the other hand, this fact also compelled biologists themselves to
ponder a great deal. In essence, it was only under the impact of cybernet-
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ics and its practical demands that biologists first gave their full attention
to the questions: What is control? Why and how does it arise in the
animal and plant world?
Let us note that control and controllability never and nowhere arise
as goals in themselves, as things existing for their own sake. Control is
required where a task of some kind is set, where one or another goal that
it is necessary to achieve is defined. Controllability is necessary to the
extremities or wings of an animal in order that they obediently bear it in
the required direction, in which something prompts it to run or fly. Con-
trollability is the main means of securing the obedience of the multi-
joint chains of man’s limbs when he performs physical labor, or of his
fingers when he draws or writes. Control and controllability, finally, lie
at the foundation of the most fundamental phenomenon of life—devel-
opment. For it is they alone that ensure, despite all possible interfer-
ences and all the diversity of life situations, that the acorn grows into an
oak and not into a maple or linden tree and that the hen’s egg hatches
into a chick and not into a swan or flamingo.
In other words, controllability arises in the animal and plant world
because their representatives develop and act in a directed fashion. Both
man and animals need the obedient controllability of all their organs in
order to act upon the situation surrounding them in accordance with
their needs. The actions of the bird when she builds her nest conform
with plan: she does not rush about at random, hither and thither, but is
guided by something like a purpose or predetermination of what her
actions must lead to. The predator fish pursuing its catch, the monkey
clambering up a tree for fruit, the insect flying toward its chosen flower—
all these and innumerable others are examples of directed actions.
And so, while the brain of the living being obtains information about
the current situation, about what exists now through the sense organs, it
is the brain itself, in its own still largely unexplored depths, that creates,
in accordance with the requirements of the animal, the representation or
outline of what this situation must become. Science is still far from a

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 MARCH–APRIL 2006 95

knowledge of the forms and code in which these representations or brain

models of the required future are recorded in the brain, but neither their
reality nor their significance for the activeness of the living being is in
any doubt.
This is the most important, perhaps even the crucial, service that theo-
retical cybernetics has been able to render the biological sciences. Con-
trol and controllability are necessary and arise where there exist tasks
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requiring active influence on the surrounding world; where these tasks

can in some fashion be planned in advance by the living being; where
controllability gives the latter the possibility of active, goal-directed
efforts that—within a certain number of seconds or other units of time—
will turn these tasks into reality. Thus from the biological branch of
cybernetics, the young scientific discipline of the biology (or physiology)
of activeness emerged immediately to reveal its multifaceted practical
importance.
I shall now narrow the scope of my brief essay to the physiology of
the actions of man and of the animals closest to him. This will allow me
to give a whole series of examples of the capacity of the scientific disci-
pline under discussion to clarify our understanding of many questions
that quite recently still led to a dead end.
Let us start with movements. This type of life activity was almost
completely neglected by science until very recently, despite its indisput-
able importance—so unclear was it how to approach and comprehend
it. For movements are almost the sole type of life activity by means of
which living beings interact with the surrounding world in accordance
with their own needs. The old physiology, with its superficial view of
things, attributed chief significance to the fact that often a movement
begins on the prompt of some external impetus. This phenomenon be-
longed to the broad set of so-called reflexes, which in general, ever since
the olden times of Descartes, have been given quite unjustified signifi-
cance for human and animal physiology. However, such an external im-
petus was sometimes present and sometimes not, and—the chief point—it
quite failed to explain why a movement proceeded in one way rather
than another, or what its meaning and purpose were. The physiology of
activeness was able to take a different and deeper view.
A movement is initiated or generated by a motor task defined in the
brain. Having defined it as a model of the required future, the brain then
contemplates how, by which paths and stages, it is possible to move
from what exists now to what must be the solution to the motor task. In

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the terminology of cybernetics, this is the programming of action: here,

too, cybernetics has rendered a service to physiology by supplying it
with an apt definition.
Implementation of this program also requires controllability of the
motor apparatus of the body—of its system of bones, joints, and muscles.
And here it becomes evident that the control of this apparatus to ensure
that it really does solve the motor task that has arisen proceeds under
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very difficult conditions. Indeed, almost every movement, if it has some

kind of goal and meaning, must overcome various external forces—
wind, the resistance of the material or of the adversary, and so on. All
these forces are unforeseeable and beyond the control of the acting be-
ing; therefore it is possible to overcome them (and together with them
the forces of reaction between the links of the joint extremities) only
with the aid of flexible and adaptive maneuvering. Here our organism
uses the very rich system of regulation by feedback—a device also well
known to technological automation; every conceivable kind of sense
organ conveys information to the brain about disturbing influences
and discrepancies. From what has been said, it will now be clear that the
more distinct and definite the representation of the motor task in the brain
and the more important for the living being its successful solution, the
more flexible, adaptive, and variable must be both the program for its
solution and the functioning of the control mechanisms that carry out this
program.
In many object-oriented actions, not infrequently even in simple ones,
this adaptive variability is visible even to the unaided eye. Observe your-
self as you, for example, hammer a nail into the wall, tie your shoelaces or
tie several times in succession, sharpen a pencil, cut up a piece of meat,
and so on. None of your successive movements will be identical with
any other, although they will all be goal-conforming—indeed, precisely
because they will be goal-conforming.
Now it is clear that the development of any motor skill, whether in
sports, labor, art, or any other sphere of activity, is none other than the
development of controllability for this skill. Exercise, if it is set cor-
rectly, must repeat not one or another means of solving a given motor
task (that would be useless cramming), but the process of solving this
task, gradually improving the means and making it more precise.
Therefore, even in the most highly developed motor skill or ability,
movements are always variable, not identical with one another. And care-
ful physiological analysis will show that this variation in skill-related

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movements has at least three different sources. First, it reflects adaptivity

to those external and uncontrolled interferences of which I have already
spoken. Second, it is a consequence of constantly taking into account
changing internal states within the organism itself: changes in the con-
traction of numerous muscular units, in their blood supply, and so on.
Third and finally, there is exploratory variation, arising from the fact
that the control and programming apparatus of the brain is always ac-
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tively seeking out the best ways of solving a given motor task. Develop-
ing alongside this exploration is a high stability of movements in the
face of interference, the capacity of the skill to withstand all kinds of
disruptive influences. Soviet cosmonautics has already succeeded in
demonstrating the great value of correctly designed ground training
precisely with respect to the stability of skills under the extraordinary
conditions of space flight.
The physiology of activeness, in studying the control and action ap-
paratus of living beings, is already guiding the young science of bionics
onto new paths. Having initially concentrated its entire attention on the
sense organs of representatives of the animal kingdom, which immedi-
ately struck the imagination of scientists by their diversity and perfec-
tion, bionics has now begun also to collect material on the organs and
mechanisms of movement of animals, which display no less remarkable
“technological solutions.” Let us recall here the puzzling but indisput-
ably real microscopic properties of the skin in marine mammals (dol-
phins), which ensure that water currents flow past them in laminar,
eddy-free fashion and enable them to swim with phenomenal ease and
speed. Likewise worthy of mention are the aerodynamic properties, still
far from fully studied, of the fringed construction of birds’ feathers, which
varies in accordance with the role of different feathers in flying. We also
have the unique kinematics of the movements of wings both in birds and
in flying insects, which for all their profound aerodynamic effectiveness
can still not be imitated at the current level of technology.
It is well known how many diverse efforts have been made in recent
decades to solve the very puzzling problem of guided long-distance air
and water transmigrations of animals. A bird that nests in summer in the
north finds without error the woodland hillock or finial of the roof where
it made its nest the year before. Sea turtles that inhabit the shores of
Central America confidently swim across the Atlantic Ocean to a small
island where they like to lay their eggs, often over a thousand kilometers
distant from the mainland. Dozens of plausible hypotheses have been

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suggested concerning what guides these animals in accomplishing such

actions, and many often highly ingenious experiments have been set up
to test them. But, it appears, only the physiology of activeness is able to
demonstrate the reason for the dead end in which science remains stuck
on this question.
Indeed, however diverse and richly combined the sense elements pos-
sessed, for instance, by a transmigrating bird (and it is beyond all doubt
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that it is well equipped with such information-bearing sense elements),

what would its brain do with all these information flows if it had noth-
ing to check them against? Both the evolutionary origin of the sense
elements of this group and the modes of their use can be based only on
the capacity of the bird’s brain to form a clear internal model of the
required route. It is only by discovering what kind of model this is and
in what code it is recorded in the brain of the bird or sea turtle that we
shall, apparently, find our way to a rigorous experimental solution to the
problem of the navigational mechanisms in these animals.
There is another young branch of biocybernetics that rests wholly on
the physiology (and psychology) of activeness—heuristics, the object
of which is the planned search for optimal decisions and programs of
action. And even a technological problem that at first glance is extremely
remote from both physiology and activeness—the problem of machine
translation from one language to another—is beginning increasingly to
feel the fruitful influence of the new views advanced by the science of
activeness. A new and highly promising platform is being built on the
proposition that speech is an action that represents active thought.
Such, in briefest outline, are the broad and diverse prospects for theory
and practice that are being opened up for us by the physiology of active-
ness and by the wider scientific field that encompasses it—the biology
of activeness.

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