Brain Processes, Theories, and Models

These 55 contributions celebrate the lasting impact that McCulloch had on the study of the brain and the formal modeling of human intelligence. W. S. McCulloch, a professor of psychiatry at Illinois, later a scientist at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT and author of the groundbreaking book, Embodiments of Mind (reissued in paperback in 1988), was one of the founding fathers of "Cybernetics." Along with Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, and H. von Foerster, he sought to integrate the disciplines of neurophysiology, mathematics, and engineering in a rigorous investigation into what brains do and how they do it. A magnetic personality, McCulloch set thoughts into motion (for instance neural nets as parallel computers) that have sparked research and controversy for decades. These 55 contributions celebrate the lasting impact that McCulloch had on the study of the brain and the formal modeling of human intelligence. They cover a number of varied topics in the general area of neural modeling and are divided into five sections: Essays and General Brain Theory, Mathematical Tools and Global Models, Neurons and Neural Nets, Vision, and AI and Engineering related topics.ContributorsH. von Foerster, Michael Arbib, James A. Anderson, Shun-Ichi Amari, Kunihiko Fukushima, Shunsuke Sato, Paul Cull, and Gregory Mulhauser