With the dawning of the industrial age, intellectuals were thinking about machines. Just as people apply the computer metaphor now, the machine metaphor permeated popular thought then. By this point, the later part of the nineteenth century, advances in biology had comfortably attributed many aspects of behavior to the machinelike operations of the nervous system. Biologists knew that it took time for signals to be processed in the eyes, travel along the axons connecting them to the thalamus, then ride the nerve highways to the cortex, and finally become part of the pattern of processing
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