An MIT mathematician named Norbert Wiener (1895-1964) coined the term cybernetics defined the word, which he derived from the Greek (from which also comes the English word "govern"), as the science of communication and control in animals and machines.
Cybernetics referred to an understanding of the animal nervous system, suggesting that a person might consider the brain as a collection of individual neurons that behave much like the binary circuits of a digital computer.
Subsequent research showed that this concept was not correct, but the analogy had a strong effect on biologists, driving them toward a more mathematical and rigorous basis for their own work, and on computer engineers, leading them to think of their creations more as information processing machines than as electronic circuits.