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 first issue in this four-part series contains five articles by McCulloch:
In general, my selection of which articles should go in each issue was guided by their volume placement and their number of citations. In addition, I exercised a bit of editorial judgment to keep like concepts somewhat together. The selection of “Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics” was somewhat obvious given that this set of issues and the second edition is the work of the American Society for Cybernetics. As of February 2020, it was cited more than 80 times according to Google Scholar. By contrast, "Logical Calculus" has been cited more than 18,600 times and is clearly regarded as McCulloch’s seminal work. The other three articles have been cited between 80 and 150 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”
Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity
Functional Organization in the Sensory Cortex of the Monkey (*Macaca Mulatta*)
Factors for Facilitation and Extinction in the Central Nervous System
The Statistical Organization of Nervous Activity
Two books are recommended four times: The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach and Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks In Brains And Computers. The notions of consciousness and networks clearly underlie the commonalities in the articles. Running the full text through a key concept extractor confirms the point: Consciousness, Cybernetics, Science, Nervous, and Systems.
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.
We have applied similar steps to the articles in each issue of E:CO.
A word cloud of the five articles in this issue shows: activity, after discharge, amplitude, antecedent, area, cells, change, cortex, cortical, distribution, ECG, electrical, electrodes, experiments, extinction, facilitation, focus, following, form, given, increase, interval, local, Macaca, motor, must, nervous, net, nets, neuron, number, record, response, results, second, see, sensory, shows, spikes, stimulation, strychninization, system, test, threshold, time, upon, voltage, will, and within. A key word generator suggests: stimulation, cortex, excitation, inhibition, response, activity, facilitation, latency, and logic.
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: Activity, Brain, Cortex, Cybernetics, Deep, Events, Hilgard, Information, Learning, Mind, Models, Nervous, Neural, Stimulation, Systems, Theory.
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 stimulation, cortex, excitation, inhibition, response, activity, facilitation, latency, logic. This results in:
Interestingly, one can generate a somewhat different list by making use of those same keywords inside JStor's internal search engine. For example, a JStor TextAnalyzer search using Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics produces the following as key concepts: Logic, Cybernetics, Self Organizing Systems, Quakers, and Philosophy of Mathematics, whereas the epi-search analysis produced: Activity, Think, Information, Computers, Engineers, Logic, Cybernetics, Functions, Norbert, and Problems. The remaining four articles are shown below:
| McCulloch Article | JStor TextAnalyzer Keywords/Concepts | Epi-Search Keywords/Concepts |
|---|---|---|
| Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics | Logic, Cybernetics, Self Organizing Systems, Quakers, Philosophy of Mathematics | Activity, Think, Information, Computers, Engineers, Logic, Cybernetics, Functions, Norbert, Problems |
| A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity | Neurons, Nerve Tissue, Propositional Logic, Formal Languages, Quantification | Activity, Means, Net, Assumptions, Logic, Neuron, Choices, Expression, Sense, Theorem |
| Functional Organization in the Sensory Cortex of the Monkey | Electrocardiography, Motor Cortex, Neural Oscillations, Spinal Cord, Cerebral Cortex | Cortex, Strychnine, Strychninization, Post, Results, Activity, Deals, Spikes, Area, Organization |
| Factors for Facilitation and Extinction in the Central Nervous System | Evoked Potentials, Ordered Pairs, Running, Electroencephalography, Spacetime | Stimulation, Response, Limb, Cortex, Phenomenon, CNS, Physiology, Excitation, Extinction, Facilitation |
| The Statistical Organization of Nervous Activity | Neurons, Nervous System, Reflexes, Neuroscience, Artificial Neural Networks | Activity, Neurophysiology, Signals, Input, Algebra, Theories, System, Behavior, Methods, Conceptions |
The differences between these lists are themselves suggestive of the role of intellectual habitus and representational networks in knowledge retrieval—important current day implications of McCulloch's work from many decades ago.
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.
One word of caution: McCulloch had a vast vocabulary and had a tendency to use some rather obscure English words. Once again Google is there for the rescue. (In editing this issue I learned at least two dozen new words.)
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