(Physio)logical circuits: The intellectual origins of the McCulloch–Pitts neural networks

Abstract

This article examines the intellectual and institutional factors that contributed to the collaboration of neuropsychiatrist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts on the logic of neural networks, which culminated in their 1943 publication, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity." Historians and scientists alike often refer to the McCulloch-Pitts paper as a landmark event in the history of cybernetics, and fundamental to the development of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. This article seeks to bring some historical context to the McCulloch-Pitts collaboration itself, namely, their intellectual and scientific orientations and backgrounds, the key concepts that contributed to their paper, and the institutional context in which their collaboration was made. Although they were almost a generation apart and had dissimilar scientific backgrounds, McCulloch and Pitts had similar intellectual concerns, simultaneously motivated by issues in philosophy, neurology, and mathematics. This article demonstrates how these issues converged and found resonance in their model of neural networks. By examining the intellectual backgrounds of McCulloch and Pitts as individuals, it will be shown that besides being an important event in the history of cybernetics proper, the McCulloch-Pitts collaboration was an important result of early twentieth-century efforts to apply mathematics to neurological phenomena.

Flavonoids and brain health: multiple effects underpinned by common mechanisms

“…Kant suggested that there must be such 'architecture' in the brain, in order that we may interpret sensory information (Kant's so called 'a priori' or 'innate knowledge'). This may now be interpreted not only psychologically but also physiologically [40,46], in that one does not come to sensory data as a 'blank tablet', but rather brings a sort of relational structure within the nervous system to interpret sense data [1,2,46]. Consequently, the nature of our sensory impressions is determined a priori by the physiological apparatus of our senses or by the sensory nerve centres and the memory acquisition, storage and recall centres of the brain [2].…”

Understanding Perspectivism

“…Some of the founders of computational neuroscience, such as Rashevsky, McCulloch, and Pitts, were quite self-aware about the purpose of this kind of abstraction and idealization ( Abraham 2002 ). 6 On the other hand, neuroscientists and philosophers under the influence of functionalist theories of mind have had more of a tendency to interpret the brain-computer analogy in a literal way: to treat even rough functional equivalence as an indicator of sameness at a higher level of description, namely, at the level of the coding scheme or algorithm that both systems are said to implement.…”

Margaret Kennard (1899–1975): Not a ‘Principle’ of brain plasticity but a founding mother of developmental neuropsychology

“…The polymath Warren S. McCulloch was a psychologist and neurophysiologist best known as one of the founders of cybernetics (Abraham, 2002, 2003; Andrew, 2004; Christen, 2008). He moved to Yale in the fall of 1930 as an honorary research fellow (a Sterling Fellow from 1935–36) in the Laboratory for Neurophysiology of his mentor and colleague, Dusser de Barenne, with whom he published some 20 papers on the organization of the primate cortex, and whose obituary he authored (McCulloch, 1940).…”