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The Macy Conferences were a series of meetings of scholars drawn from numerous disciplines held after the second world war in New York on the initiative of Warren McCulloch and the Macy Foundation between 1946 and 1953. The primary goal of this series of conferences was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind. The Macy Conferences were largely responsible for coalescing an immanent set of ideas into the new field of cybernetics. Cybernetics, in the words of Norbert Wiener is "the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine."

Some of the researchers present at the conferences later went on to do extensive government funded research on the psychological effects of LSD, and its potential as a tool for interrogation and psychological manipulation in such projects as the CIA's MKULTRA program.

For further information see: American Society for Cybernetics and current debates on second generation cybernetics.