Guest Edited by: MICHAEL R. LISSACK, ANNA L. HOLLAND

Issue Articles


ACADEMIC

Recollections of the many sources of cybernetics

Norbert Wiener - five years my senior - wrote elegantly of "Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" as he saw it coming, and christened it Cybernetics. For years his scientific activities had been leading to it. He had been unable to... Read More

ACADEMIC

A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity

Because of the "all-or-none" character of nervous activity, neural events and the relations among them can be treated by means of propositional logic. It is found that the behavior of every net can be described in these terms, with the addition of mo... Read More

with WALTER PITTS

ACADEMIC

Functional organization the sensory cortex of the monkey (Macaca Mulatta)

In 1924 the location and extent of the sensory cortex were established in the brain of the monkey (Macaca) by means of the method of local strychninization. This cortex was found to occupy a large portion of the post- and precentral region, and to co... Read More

with WARREN S. McCULLOCH

ACADEMIC

Factors for facilitation and extinction in the central nervous system

The Phenomenon now known as "facilitation" was discovered in 1881 by Bubnoff and Heidenhain who observed that, with an interval of only a few seconds, repetition of supraliminal stimulation of a "motor" focus of the cerebral cortex elicited a larger ... Read More

with WARREN S. McCULLOCH

ACADEMIC

The statistical organization of nervous activity

This is not a review of neurophysiology but a synopsis of some theories which may lead to an understanding of the mental aspects of nervous activity, namely ideas and purposes. The highway to ideas lies through statistical conceptions from their logi... Read More

with WALTER PITTS