Brain modeling has come to be an important subspecialty of mathematical logic, engineering technology, experimental psychology, and neurophysiology. It is, moreover, abundantly clear that psychoanalysis, in those theoretical aspects of the discipline which Freud came to refer to as "structural" and "topographical," represents essentially an information-flow model.
It is proposed now to advance a model which is sufficiently simple to be readily grasped, sufficiently general to be freely adaptable to the requirements of empirical observation, but at the same time sufficiently powerful to suggest important considerations for clinical practice, and which, it is believed, will be consistent with the available evidence from all branches of behavioral study. It has the advantage of offering the possibility, in principle, of applying quantitative methods to medical psychology, and of providing the only demonstrably adequate solution to an outstanding problem in neurophysiology, namely, the so-called neuro-economy