The prophet who foretold our future.

Staring out from the cover of Tara Abraham’s book, Rebel Genius, Warren McCulloch strikes one as a biblical prophet, someone who has the power to foresee the future. He was a remarkable individual at the dawn of a new age in the science of the mind-brain, whose reach extended from psychiatry to mathematics, and who had a talent for bringing together thought leaders from diverse fields of science and the humanities. Many early concepts in brain function, some of which persist today, can be traced back to McCulloch and others in his circle who were inspired by him. This book tells the remarkable story of how these pioneers came together in the first half of the 20th century and laid the foundation for recent advances in neural computation and machine learning that are transforming the 21st century. McCulloch was trained in psychiatry, and began his career at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute, where he collaborated with Percival Bailey, Gerhardt von Bonin and Horace Magoun on exploring the cortical organization of chimps and monkeys. It was in Chicago that he met Jerome Lettvin and Walter Pitts, who would become lifelong colleagues and friends. They were both just starting their careers and were mentored by McCulloch, who had an unusual ability to treat others as equals, including children. Everyone was struck by his piercing eyes and ability to listen carefully and help them clarify what they were trying to say. The golden period for McCulloch started when Jerome Wiesner, soon to become head of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, and eventually the president of MIT, invited McCulloch and his Chicago group to join his lab. It was at MIT, surrounded by exceptionally talented colleagues, including neurophysiologists Patrick Wall and Jerome Lettvin, that McCulloch became a sage. He influenced the lives of many young investigators, among them Marvin Minsky, who would become a founder of artificial intelligence (p. 170): ‘And he had a grand view of this, the importance of cybernetics, which was correct, so, otherwise you would have said he was delusional. . .but I must have spent the most part of a year just hanging around him and trying to understand how he could see such importance in ordinary things’. Many other lives were similarly influenced by McCulloch during this period, including a generation of budding brain theorists that included Michael Arbib (2018), Jack Cowan, and Manuel Blum. McCulloch’s group flourished at MIT, with Lettvin carrying out experiments on the frog retina that would influence a generation of neurophysiologists, and with Walter Pitts, a mathematical genius, pioneering studies that would influence the early days of computer science (Lettvin, 1998). McCulloch became his guardian as well as collaborator when Pitts tragically succumbed to depression and died prematurely (Gefter, 2015). McCulloch’s collected papers from that era reflect the broad range of his interests and many collaborators (McCulloch, 1965). McCulloch was central to a series of 10 focused meetings spanning 1942 to 1953 sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation, which brought together John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Margaret Mead, Karl Lashley, Ross Ashby, Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, Rafael Lorente de Nó, R. Karl Pribram, Duncan Luce, Donald M. MacKay, Gregory Bateson, Ralph Girard and many others (Macy Conferences, Wikipedia). This was a mid20th century dream team. The overall theme was cybernetics, a new approach at the time to understanding the REBEL GENIUS: WARREN MCCULLOCH’S TRANSDISCIPLINARY LIFE IN SCIENCE By Tara H. Abraham 2016 MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA ISBN: 9780262035095 US$ 40 doi:10.1093/brain/awy212 BRAIN 2018: 141; 2820–2822 | 2820