Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (The MIT Press)

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Description

The life and work of a scientist who spent his career crossing disciplinary boundaries — from experimental neurology to psychiatry to cybernetics to engineering.

Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969) adopted many identities in his scientific life — among them philosopher, poet, neurologist, neurophysiologist, neuropsychiatrist, collaborator, theorist, cybernetician, mentor, engineer. He was once, writes Tara Abraham on this account of McCulloch’s life and work, “an intellectual showman,” and performed this part during his career. At the same time as McCulloch claimed a common thread in his work was once the issue of mind and its relationship to the brain, there was once a lot more to him than that. In Rebel Genius, Abraham uses McCulloch’s life as a window on a past scientific age, showing the complex transformations that took place in American brain and mind science within the twentieth century — particularly those surrounding the cybernetics movement.

Abraham describes McCulloch’s early work in neuropsychiatry, and his emerging identity as a neurophysiologist. She explores his transformative years on the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute and his work with Walter Pitts — ceaselessly seen as the first iteration of “artificial intelligence” but here described as stemming from the new tradition of mathematical treatments of biological problems. Abraham argues that McCulloch’s dual identities as neuropsychiatrist and cybernetician are inseparable. He used the authority he gained in traditional disciplinary roles as a basis for posing big questions about the brain and mind as a cybernetician. When McCulloch moved to the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, new practices for studying the brain, grounded in mathematics, philosophy, and theoretical modeling, expanded the relevance and ramifications of his work. McCulloch’s transdisciplinary legacies anticipated these days’s multidisciplinary field of cognitive science.

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