Warren S. McCulloch Publishes Embodiments of Mind

Embodiments of Mind is a collection of essays and lectures by Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, the inventors of the neural network (on paper) in 1943.

The book includes that neural network founding paper itself, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (1943), which provided the first mathematical blueprint for artificial neural networks and modern deep learning.

It also includes a 1947 paper on how nervous circuits might recognize the same shape at any size or position. Twenty years after these astronomically important ideas were first formulated, this book helped repopularize the idea of neural networks and perceptrons in AI. This was the era pre-split, before neural networks were disdainfully prejudged (and underfunded) for nearly two decades.