Manfred Clynes
Biography
Manfred Edward Clynes (14 August 1925 – 2 October 2020) was an Austrian-born Australian-American scientist, inventor, concert pianist and neurophysiologist, and the co-author of the paper that coined the word cyborg.
Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, he left Austria after the Anschluss and settled in Australia, where he took degrees in engineering and music at Melbourne; he later studied piano at Juilliard and had a performing career, recording the complete Bach keyboard works. He was chief research scientist at Rockland State Hospital in New York, where the cyborg paper was written, and later directed research at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music.
The combination is not incidental: Clynes spent his life on the same question in two registers — how bodily states are physically produced and regulated, whether by a drug pump or by a phrase of music.
Cyborgs and Space
With the psychiatrist Nathan S. Kline, Clynes published "Cyborgs and Space" in Astronautics in September 1960.[1] The paper was written for a NASA-sponsored conference on the psychophysiological aspects of space flight, and its proposal was that instead of transporting an Earth-like environment into space, the human organism should be adapted to survive there.
Clynes coined the portmanteau — cybernetic organism — and the emphasis he insisted on was on the cybernetic part. The additions were to operate as self-regulating homeostatic systems, functioning without conscious attention, exactly as the body's existing regulation does. The paper's stated purpose was to leave the astronaut "free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel." The illustrative case was an osmotic pump implanted in a laboratory rat.
Clynes maintained for the rest of his life that popular usage had inverted his meaning: a cyborg, correctly understood, is not a person carrying obvious machinery but a person whose regulatory range has been unconsciously extended.
Sentics
His other major work concerns the physical expression of emotion. Clynes developed sentics, the study of what he called essentic forms — specific, cross-culturally stable dynamic patterns of pressure over time that express particular emotions. He built the sentograph, an instrument measuring the transient pressure of a fingertip, and used it to record and compare the expressive gestures associated with anger, love, grief, joy and reverence across subjects and cultures. He set the results out in Sentics: The Touch of Emotions (1977).
His related concept of the pulse in music — the claim that individual composers have characteristic microscopic timing and amplitude signatures that performers reproduce — informed his work on computer music performance and the SuperConductor software.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Clynes gave the field its name and, more importantly, its original criterion: integration below the level of conscious attention. Reading the 1960 paper is the fastest correction to the assumption that a cyborg is defined by visible hardware. His sentics work is also a rare attempt to treat emotional expression as a measurable physical dynamic — an approach with obvious relatives in later research on paralanguage and affective computing.
