Warren McCulloch made an untenable leap of faith in the early 1940s. The kind of creative daring that only his bizarre mélange of psychiatrist-neuroscientist-philosopher-theorist1 would attempt. The first fuzzy pictures of spikes appeared in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Tiny wobbles on an oscilloscope,2 showing electrical pulses so small they’d be vaporized by a cough in the next room. Yet McCulloch was struck by how each spike from the same neuron looked roughly the same shape, the same size, every time it appeared. With just a handful of neurons then recorded, he made a bold prediction:
...more
