The essays in this book treat a variety of topics - from cybernetics and automation to physical research and the supernatural - but the diversity is largely on the surface. Underneath is a persistent concern with problems located at the intersection of scientific psychology and communication theory, concern with an attempt to formulate a psychological conception of man as an information-gathering, information-processing system. Most of these essays deal explicitly with psychological aspects of communication. Some reflect a communicative concern less directly. Memory, for example, is a communication from the past to the future, and the channel it travels from source to destination is often the human nervous system; the problem is to encode the message in such a way as to resist the ubiquitous noise that this channel introduces.