Editor’s Introduction - Issue 21.3

The collected works of Warren S. McCulloch are vast. Our goal in re-introducing them through this four-part series in E:CO is to whet the reader’s appetite for the wealth of insight found in the full four-volume collection. We also hope to excite the researcher with our use of latent semantic analysis tools in creating a context in which to place the McCulloch works. The 30+ years during which the collection lay fallow deprived current day researchers of a what should have been a rich intellectual ecology to situate the works. Our goal with the use of technology is to provide researchers with a similar intellectual habitus.

The third issue in this four-part series begins with a review article by Stuart Umpleby the President of the International Academy for Systems and the Cybernetic Sciences (and a past President of the ASC). It contains five articles by McCulloch:

1. The projection of the frontal lobe on the hypothalamus, Volume 2, Chapter 50, cited 143 times.
2. A recapitulation of the theory with a forecast of several extensions, Volume 2, Chapter 59, cited 30 times.
3. Reflex inhibition by dorsal root interaction, Volume 3, Chapter 90, cited 173 times.
4. Agathe Tyche, of nervous nets, Volume 3, Chapter 101, cited 74 times.
5. What's in the brain that ink may character? , Volume 4, Chapter 122, cited 27 times.

There are, of course, some commonalities amongst the articles. When their contents are run through the American Society for Cybernetic’s epi-search software the following are displayed as recommended book from the ASC’s ISCE Library:

ISCE Library Recommendations of “Related Books”

The projection of the frontal lobe on the hypothalamus

• Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks In Brains And Computers
• Going Inside
• The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind
• ID: The Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century
• Unlocking the Brain: Volume 1: Coding
• The Tell-Tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature
• The Mind Machine (BBC)
• Descartes' Error
• The Wisdom Paradox
• Social Neuroscience: Integrating Biological and Psychological Explanations of Social Behavior

A recapitulation of the theory with a forecast of several extensions

• Decisions, Uncertainty, And The Brain: The Science Of Neuroeconomics (Bradford Books)
• The Brain And The Meaning Of Life
• The Tree Of Knowledge: Biological Roots Of Human Understanding
• Emergent Mechanisms
• In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
• Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain
• The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes
• Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Consciousness
• Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain's Power to Adapt Can Change Your Life
• Beyond reductionism, new perspectives in the life sciences: the Alpbach Symposium [1968]

Reflex inhibition by dorsal root interaction

• Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are
• Dynamic Patterns
• Unlocking the Brain: Volume 1: Coding
• Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought: Essays in Honor of Eric Lenneberg
• From Being to Doing. The Origins of the Biology of Cognition.
• The brain that changes itself : stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science
• Purposive Systems: Proceedings of the First Annual Symposium of the American Society for Cybernetics
• The Computer and the Brain
• Use Both Sides of Your Brain: New Mind-Mapping Techniques, Third Edition (Plume)
• Design for a Brain: The Origin of Adaptive Behavior

Agathe Tyche, of nervous nets

• Information In The Brain: A Molecular Perspective
• Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks In Brains And Computers
• Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are
• Impossible Minds: My Neurons, My Consciousness
• Plato's Camera
• The Dream of Reality
• Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition
• Emergence: From Chaos To Order
• The Computer and the Brain
• Causation and Explanation (Topics in Contemporary Philosophy)

What's in the brain that ink may character?

• First You Build a Cloud: and Other Reflections on Physics as a Way Of Life
• The Knowable and The Unknowable
• The Truth of Science
• Forces and Fields
• Popper Selections
• The End of Physics: The Myth Of A Unified Theory
• On Science
• The Philosophy of Science. An Introduction.
• The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens
• Treatise on Basic Philosophy: Volume 6: Epistemology & Methodology II: Understanding the World

This subset of articles is focused on the brain, the mind and the make-up of cognition. In addition, the notions of Science, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Understanding, and Biology underlie the commonalities in the articles. Running the full text of all the articles combined through a key concept extractor highlights a different aspect of these articles: their common concern with the mechanics of the brain itself: Cortex, Nucleus, Nuclei, Hypothalamus, Posterior, Projections, Lobe, Surface, Feedback, and Circuits. A word cloud of the five articles in this issue shows: Activity, Afferent, Area, Case, Cell, Central, Change, Compute, Conditioning, Cortex, Current, Different, Dorsal, Electrode, Error, Feedback, Fibers, Figure, Form, Formula, Frac, Functions, Impulses, Inhibition, Jot, Logic, Mechanism, Msec, Nervous, Net, Neurons, Number, Organism, Partial, Point, Possible, Potential, Propositions, Recording, Relations, Requires, Root, Signal, Stability, Stimulation, Structure, System, Threshold, Values, and Volley. This confirms the emphasis on brain mechanisms.

Similar analyses are shown for each of the articles. We have prepared a word cloud, extracted key concepts or topics, and run several key word generators—all with a goal of finding a good short-hand representation of the article itself over and above the abstract of the article prepared by the author. When these shorthand representations are combined (using the ASC’s epi-search technology or its equivalent—we recommend http://findrelatedbooks.com), it becomes possible to look for related books and articles which build upon the original McCulloch article and illustrate where a contemporary researcher might find linkages and inspiration. Thus the shorthand representations are followed by a list of prominent works which cite the McCulloch article (citations per Google Scholar) and a list each of related articles (Google Scholar) and books (Google books) derived by running the complete shorthand representation (abstract plus word cloud plus concepts plus keywords) through the recommendation engine at http://findrelatedbooks.com. It is our intent that by providing this material current day researchers will be able to quickly see how a given McCulloch article relates to their own work or to works they are interested in.

What I find to be of the most interest is locating the McCulloch articles in the current context of today. When I use epi-search on the collection of citations, related articles, and related books from each of the five McCulloch pieces in this issue, the following list of related books is produced:

What this collection demonstrates is the high relevance of McCulloch's work to current research. These works, in turn, are focused around the following keywords or concepts: Brain, Cortex, Cybernetics, Science, Neuroscience, Stimulation, Neurons, Psychology, Theory, Physiology.

The lists of concepts and key words can, of course, be used to find related material from any corpus. For example, if one wanted to find items in the JStor collection related to these five articles as a group, the following search would be entered into Google: site:jstor.org Brain, Cortex, Cybernetics, Science, Neuroscience, Stimulation, Neurons, Psychology, Theory, Physiology.

This results in:

This list of JStor articles shown above is yet another good representation of the work in this issue.

At the end of each article we present the results of the "epi-search" analysis: first a word cloud list of the fifty most used words in the article, then the "topics" as analyzed by the software, and three lists of keywords: the final output of our analysis (generated from the "lexical profile" of the article, a preliminary list generated from the full text of the article using the epi-search software, and a similar list compiled using software from cortical.io.) These are then followed by a list of the top articles which Google Scholar shows to be citing that McCulloch article, a list of "related articles" produced by using the final keywords from the epi-search software as a search in Google Scholar, and a list of "related books" produced by using the final keywords from the epi-search software as a search in Google Books. There will be similar “end pieces” for each McCulloch article in this series.

On behalf of the American Society for Cybernetics, it is my great honor to welcome you to a contemporary read of the great works of Warren S. McCulloch.

Michael Lissack

President, American Society for Cybernetics and Founding Editor, E:CO, Emergence and Complexity in Organizations