Elsevier

Biosystems

Volume 88, Issue 3, April 2007, Pages 185-190
Biosystems

On the legacy of W.S. McCulloch

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2006.08.010Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper, we review McCulloch’s legacy, from his early work in neurophysiology, and its relationship to his philosophical quest for an ‘experimental epistemology’ to his role in the cybernetics movement during the 1940s and 1950s and his contributions to the development of computer science and communication theory.

There are three parts in chronological sequence. First, the period up to his work at Yale University with Dusser de Barenne, where he concentrated on the experimental study of the functional organization of sensory cortex. Second, the time of his Psychiatric Chair at the University of Chicago and the organization of the Macy Foundation Conferences. To this period corresponds the genesis and publication of the most influential and quoted work by McCulloch and Pitts: A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Neurons Activity. Third, the period of his research activity at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology where he, Lettvin, Maturana and Pitts produced epochmaking papers on epistemological neurophysiology, the modelling of the reticular formation and other work with da Fonseca and Moreno-Díaz.

We finally refer to the International Conference that took place in McCulloch’s memory at the 25th anniversary of his death. Our main conclusion is that McCulloch’s writings are still a source of inspiration from neurophysiology to artificial intelligence and robotics.

Introduction

Warren Sturgis McCulloch (1898–1969) was a brain research scientist at Yale University, professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and later, a scientist at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, in Cambridge, MA. Together with Wiener, von Neumann, von Foerster and others, he is credited with having been one of the pillars of cybernetics from the forties on and one of the great thinkers of the previous century. In the search for an experimental theory of the origin, nature, methods and limits of knowledge (experimental epistemology, a physiological theory of knowledge) he went from psychology to psychiatry, and on to neurophysiology, to which he brought an array of mathematical, logical and symbolic skills (Fig. 1).

Section snippets

From early times to the University of Yale

McCulloch had, since his youth, a multidisciplinary education. As a freshman, he took courses in theology, along with considerable philosophy, psychology, mathematics and mathematical physics at Haverford College and later at Yale University. He had served during World War II as a second class seaman engaged in marlin-spike seamanship and semaphore (he considered these to be topology and communication) and from very early, he was attracted to the epistemic problems of mathematics. He used to

At the University of Illinois and the Macy Foundation Conferences

In 1941 McCulloch went to the University of Illinois (Chicago) to organize a team of specialists to form the biological basis of the Department of Psychiatry. They were to be involved in neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, physics and chemistry, excluding behavioural problems, treated somewhere else. Among his collaborators at that time were Jerry Lettvin, Patrick Wall and Walter Pitts. Their research produced relevant work on cortico-cortical mapping, schizofrenia, control of posture and motion.

At the research laboratory of electronics, MIT

In 1952 McCulloch moved to M.I.T., where Norbert Wiener was. He continued neurophysiologic, logical and epistemological work and essays with his Chicago collaborators Jerry Lettvin, Walter Pitts and Patrick Wall. A young anatomist from Chile, Humberto Maturana, joined the group. In 1955 they published their finding of presynaptic inhibition (Howland et al., 1955). In 1959 they produced a landmark in epistemic science, this time in epistemological neurophysiology: What the Frog’s Eye tells the

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