Editor’s Introduction - Issue 21.2

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 second issue in this four-part series contains five articles by McCulloch:

1. How We Know Universals the Perception of Auditory and Visual Forms, Volume 2, Chapter 57, Cited 942 times
2. A Heterarchy of Values Determined by the Topology of Nervous Nets, Volume 2, Chapter 44, Cited 409 times
3. The Limiting Information Capacity of a Neuronal Link, Volume 2, Chapter 71, Cited 384 times
4. Why the Mind is in the Head? Volume 2, Chapter 66, Cited 152 times
5. The Brain as a Computing Machine, Volume 2, Chapter 61, Cited 85 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”

How We Know Universals the Perception of Auditory and Visual Forms

• The Mind And The Brain: Neuroplasticity And The Power Of Mental Force
• Going Inside
• Attentional Processing
• The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
• Neuroculture
• Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts
• Unlocking the Brain: Volume 1: Coding
• The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness
• Dennett and his Critics: Demystifying Mind
• Seeing, Thinking and Knowing: Meaning and Self-Organization in Visual Cognition and Thought

A Heterarchy of Values Determined by the Topology of Nervous Nets

• The Mind And The Brain: Neuroplasticity And The Power Of Mental Force
• 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 Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
• Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain
• Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought: Essays in Honor of Eric Lenneberg
• Beyond reductionism, new perspectives in the life sciences

The Limiting Information Capacity of a Neuronal Link

• 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
• Going Inside
• Plato's Camera
• The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
• The Dream of Reality
• Neuroculture
• Unlocking the Brain: Volume 1: Coding
• The Computer and the Brain

Why the Mind is in the Head?

• The Mind And The Brain: Neuroplasticity And The Power Of Mental Force
• Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks In Brains And Computers
• Going Inside
• Attentional Processing
• The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
• Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts
• The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind
• Unlocking the Brain: Volume 1: Coding
• The brain that changes itself: stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science
• Dennett and his Critics: Demystifying Mind

The Brain as a Computing Machine

• The Mind And The Brain: Neuroplasticity And The Power Of Mental Force
• A Universe Of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
• Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks In Brains And Computers
• Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are
• Going Inside
• The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
• Neuroculture
• The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind
• Unlocking the Brain: Volume 1: Coding
• The brain that changes itself: stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science

One book appears in all five sets of recommendations: The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Four books are recommended four times: Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks In Brains And Computers, Going Inside, The Mind And The Brain: Neuroplasticity And The Power Of Mental Force, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, and Unlocking the Brain: Volume 1: Coding. The notions of consciousness, neurons, and networks clearly underlie the commonalities in the articles. Running the full text of all the articles combined through a key concept extractor confirms the point: Cortex, Nervous, System, Cells, Neurons, Memory, and Visual.

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.

A word cloud of the five articles in this issue shows: Activity, Alpha, Area, Behavior, Brain, Case, Cells, Change, Circuits, Computing, Conditions, Connections, Cortex, Different, Excitation, Eyes, Fact, Fibers, Field, Figure, Form, Function, General, Impulses, Information, Machine, McCulloch, Mechanism, Memory, Name, Nerve, Nervous, Net, Neurons, Number, Point, Possible, Process, Question, Relations, Relays, Signals, State, Stimulation, Structure, System, Theory, Think, Value, Visual. A key word generator suggests: Cortex, Neurons, Layer, Neuron, Manifold, Axons, Values, Excitation, Figure, Fibers.

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, Neuroscience, Mind, Cognition, Neurons, Descartes, Consciousness, Minds, Memory, Understanding.

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 Scholar: site:jstor.org Brain, Neuroscience, Mind, Cognition, Neurons, Descartes, Consciousness, Minds, Memory, Understanding.

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