English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Conference Paper

Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts: A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons225707

Palm,  G
Former Department Structure and Function of Natural Nerve-Net , Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Max Planck Society;
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Max Planck Society;

Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Palm, G. (1986). Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts: A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity. In G. Palm, & A. Aertsen (Eds.), Brain Theory: Proceedings of the First Trieste Meeting on Brain Theory, October 1–4, 1984 (pp. 229-230). Berlin, Germany: Springer.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0006-4C6C-D
Abstract
The classical paper by McCulloch and Pitts on “a logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity” had an enormous impact on the development of brain theory in the broadest sense. It appeared in 1943 and was the starting point for many theoretical investigations up to the present day: its basic idea was that the activation of a neuron inside a brain stands for the actual truth of a proposition about the outside world. Elementary propositions about the outside world are verified through sensors. The neurons to which these sensors are connected may themselves represent more complicated combinations of these propositions. Since it is possible to implement the logical connections not, and, and or by means of neural connections and appropriate thresholds of the neurons, one can represent every conceivable finite logical combination of the elementary propositions in a neural network.