I wish to disclaim in advance any assertion that any particular entity in psychopathology is due to a specific type of defect in the organization of the brain as a computing machine. Nevertheless, the realization that the brain and the computing machine have much in common may suggest new and valid approaches to psychopathology and even to psychiatrics. These begin with perhaps the simplest question of all: how the brain avoids gross blunders, gross miscarriages of activity, due to the malfunction of individual components.…

[The] distinction between functional and organic disorders receives a great deal of light from the consideration of the computing machine. It is not the empty physical structure of the computing machine that corresponds to the brain—to the adult brain, at least—but the combination of this structure with the instructions given it at the beginning of a chain of operations and with all the additional information stored and gained from outside in the course of this chain. This information is stored in some physical form—in the form of memory—but part of it is in the form of circulating memories. There is therefore nothing surprising in considering the functional mental disorders as fundamentally diseases of memory, of the circulating information kept by the brain in the active state, and of the long-time permeability of synapses.