The Engineer

This chapter examines the ways that McCulloch’s new research culture at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics shaped the evolution of his scientific identity into that of an engineer. This was an open, fluid, multidisciplinary culture that allowed McCulloch to shift his focus more squarely onto understanding the brain from the perspective of theoretical modelling, and to promote the cybernetic vision to diverse audiences. McCulloch’s practices, performed with a new set of student-collaborators, involved modeling the neurophysiology of perception, understanding reliability in biological systems, and pursuing knowledge of the reticular formation of the brain. The chapter provides a nuanced account of the relations between McCulloch’s work and the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences. It also highlights McCulloch’s identities as sage-collaborator and polymath, two roles that in part were the result of his students’ observations and in part products of his own self-fashioning.

The Neuropsychiatrist

In this chapter, McCulloch’s identity as a neuropsychiatrist is situated in the context of an eclectic American psychiatry following the Second World War. It argues that McCulloch’s identity as a neuropsychiatrist captures not only his very diverse interests but also his continued preoccupation with theoretical foundations. McCulloch was drawn to biological psychiatry during this period, and, collaborating with Ladislas J. Meduna, studied treatments for conditions such as schizophrenia that were based on carbohydrate metabolism and insulin shock therapy. His work stood at the interface between psychiatric research and clinical problems, and between psychiatry and neurophysiology. In light of his increased seniority as a scientist and his introduction to members of the nascent cybernetics group, he began to focus more of his attention on theoretical modelling.

The Neurophysiologist

This chapter examines McCulloch’s activities at Yale University during the 1930s, and the ways in which his work as a neurophysiologist was inseparable from his pursuits in scientific philosophy. Broadly speaking, it casts the growth of neurophysiology in the American interwar period as the result in part of efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation to rationalize scientific studies of the mind and bring the natural sciences to bear on the growing field of psychiatry. This period also witnessed increased fluidity between science and philosophy. McCulloch was transformed by both developments. His work in cerebral localization with Johannes Dusser de Barenne and his participation in Clark Hull’s seminars in on scientific foundations formed part of a unified project to generate a physiological theory of knowledge.

Introduction

This chapter argues that the best way to understand McCulloch’s various identities is to understand them as performatively produced. Drawing on Judith Butler’s framework of performative identity, the chapter outlines the ways that McCulloch’s identities were neither straightforward products of his own agency nor solely shaped by his context. It also argues that in spite of McCulloch’s self-fashioning as a philosopher and his characterization of cybernetics as universal and unified, McCulloch’s identities varied and the cybernetic project was anything but unified. At the heart of McCulloch’s scientific practices were his ways of asking grand humanistic questions, his penchant for theoretical modelling, and his rhetorical strategies. Much of these practices were responses to his institutional and cultural milieux. When seen in this light, McCulloch’s brand of cybernetics was less focused on command and control and more on introducing new scientific practices to the life and human sciences.

The Cybernetician

This chapter offers an interpretation of the cybernetics movement that places McCulloch at the centre of the story. By doing so, it illustrates that McCulloch’s cybernetic project can be best understood in light of his interest in psychiatric foundations and the problem of mind and brain. Focusing on McCulloch’s translation of his psychiatric work into the language of cybernetics, his rhetorical strategies in promoting cybernetics, and the challenges he faced, the chapter also highlights the transdisciplinary nature of cybernetics. Further, it illustrates how, despite the origin stories of McCulloch and other members of the cybernetics group, and despite its association with the American unity of science movement, the cybernetics group was more disunified than is commonly argued.

The Egalitarian Mentor

This chapter contextualizes the 1943 paper by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts on the logic of neural activity through McCulloch’s emerging institutional roles at the University of Illinois at Chicago—both in psychiatry research and as an egalitarian mentor. His performance of this identity at a crucial stage in his career facilitated his turn to the more clinical aspects of brain organization as well as his model-building practices, which converged in his rhetoric of providing a foundational basis for the ever-expanding discipline of psychiatry. The chapter discusses the role of the Rockefeller Foundation and of Nicolas Rashevsky’s group in mathematical biophysics at the University of Chicago as key institutional contexts for McCulloch’s work with Pitts. Rather than simply a precursor to later work in artificial intelligence, their work signified a burgeoning practice of applying mathematics and logic to problems in the biomedical sciences, as well as continued fluidity between science, medicine, and philosophy.

The Student of Science, Medicine, and Philosophy

By examining McCulloch’s childhood and formative years during the 1920s as a student at Yale University and Columbia University, this chapter outlines the emergence of McCulloch as a transdisciplinary investigator and a man full of paradox. McCulloch majored in philosophy at Yale and minored in psychology, and had a reputation in his graduating class of being unique and boisterous. His poetry from this period used the traditional form of the sonnet yet tackled modern themes such as science, industry, and war. These poems also align McCulloch with an idealism and longing for the “lost world” before World War I. McCulloch was trained in the laboratory culture of experimental neurology, but was also drawn to a brand of psychiatry that understood the diseased mind in terms of flaws in logic. Ultimately, McCulloch’s identities during the early part of his life transcended science, medicine, and philosophy, the hands-on and the abstract, and balanced traditional thinking with iconoclasm.

Epilogue

This final chapter reflects on the many identities McCulloch performed throughout his life: student, poet, neurophysiologist, neuropsychiatrist, cybernetician, mentor, and engineer, to name but a few. It argues that none of these can be understood as straightforward products of McCulloch’s own agency, nor were they driven by McCulloch’s institutional context. Rather, they were performatively produced. McCulloch was simultaneously irreverent and traditional, theoretical and practical. His open, generous spirit is as much a part of his scientific legacy than his theoretical contributions. McCulloch’s story also tells us much about the landscape of twentieth-century American science: fluidity between science, medicine, and philosophy, the role of patronage, and the liberation of the brain from medicine and its redefinition as a scientific object. All of these elements come together in bringing about McCulloch’s ultimate identity: the rebel genius.