But Clynes was never interested solely in helping the body maintain stasis. His work was more expansive and concentrated on the relationship between the brain and the world. Threaded through his career, Clynes has wanted to allow humans to communicate without words. In art and in science, he sought ways to escape the messiness and ambiguity of language.

Born in Vienna in 1925, Clynes was a lifelong classical musician. Through his violin, he found that he didn't need to talk to transmit and receive emotion. "Music dispenses with the words entirely with good reason. It's richer than the words and more definite," Clynes said. "Music is not vague as some people think, the more precisely you phrase the music, the more clear is the meaning.... That is the emotional language of music."

Perhaps that's why Clynes got into the study of recording the brain's electrical impulses. He sought a more definite way of knowing the mind. Early electroencephalographs could record the brain, but we couldn't make much sense of it. The brain turned out to be very noisy. When you shined a light at someone or gave them a little electrical shock, it was hard to tell what effect that actually had in their neurons.

So, Clynes created a machine called the Computer of Average Transients. It was a kind of noise canceling machine.

"It was a way of finding the needle in the haystack," he said. "Let's say you had a light stimulus of a certain color and you wanted to see the influence of looking at that color had on the electrical activity of the brain. You presented the color a few times and averaged the result."

We can think of Clynes' work with the C.A.T. as the first step on the way to the Cyborg. If you could figure out stimulus in, reaction out -- you could develop a functioning communication system without truly knowing the inner workings of the brain's machinery.

The study of what we now know as "evoked potentials" began with the C.A.T. And it was used by thousands of researchers in different fields. "For example, hearing was tested that way to see if people were deaf," Clynes recalled. "It was the most effective way of doing that without having to ask someone."

Because asking someone was imprecise. Words were narrow tubes through which we tried to squeeze too much, everything.

"Wittgenstein, the German philosopher, said we are bewitched by words -- hexed, as he put it in German -- by words," Clynes said during our conversation. "Even though we don't know what we're saying half the time."

The same might have been true with the brain's messy firing, but the C.A.T. machine could average them to find which half of the electrical impulses were noise. Words have no averages. And yet words are the way we share information. They are how we know each other and the world. We can't escape them.

Clynes, though, keeps trying. In our conversation, he related a new idea he had that would allow us to use our brains to directly interact with machines and the world.