1. Jerome Lettvin is best known as the lead author of the paper, "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain", one of the most cited papers in the Science Citation Index.
20 Facts About Jerome Lettvin
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Jerome Lettvin wrote it along with Humberto Maturana, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, and in the paper they gave special thanks and mention to Oliver Selfridge at MIT.
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Jerome Lettvin was the author of many published articles on subjects varying from neurology and physiology to philosophy and politics.
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Jerome Lettvin was born February 23,1920, in Chicago, the eldest of four children of Solomon and Fanny Jerome Lettvin, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine.
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Jerome Lettvin considered any experiment a failure from which the experimental animal does not recover to a comfortable happy life.
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Jerome Lettvin was one of the very few neurophysiologists who successfully recorded pulses from unmyelinated vertebrate axons.
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Jerome Lettvin then positioned an aluminum hemisphere around the frog's eye and moved objects attached to small magnets along the inner surface of the sphere by moving a large magnet on its outer side.
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In short, Jerome Lettvin's group discovered that a lot of what was thought to happen in the brain actually happened in the eye itself.
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Jerome Lettvin was an outspoken critic of pseudo-scientific practices relied upon by many of the social sciences, as well as the potential threat posed by Artificial Intelligence.
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Jerome Lettvin made a careful study of the work of Leibniz, discovering that he had constructed a mechanical computer in the late 17th century.
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Jerome Lettvin is known for his friendship with, and encouragement of the cognitive scientist and logician Walter Pitts, a polymath who first showed the relationship between the philosophy of Leibniz and universal computing in "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," a seminal paper Pitts co-authored with Warren McCulloch.
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Jerome Lettvin continued to research the properties of nervous systems throughout his life, culminating in his study of ion dynamics in axon cytoskeleton.
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Jerome Lettvin was a firm advocate of individual rights and heterogeneous society.
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Jerome Lettvin's father nurtured these views with ideas from Kropotkin's book Mutual Aid.
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Jerome Lettvin became an expert witness in trials in both the United States and in Israel, always on behalf of individual rights.
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Jerome Lettvin deplored the making of laws based on false science and false statistics, and the distortion of observations for political or economic advantage.
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On May 3,1967, in the Kresge Auditorium at MIT, Jerome Lettvin debated with Timothy Leary about the merits and dangers of LSD.
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Jerome Lettvin took the position that LSD is a dangerous molecule that should not be used.
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Jerome Lettvin was a regular invitee at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony as "the world's smartest man," and debated extemporaneously against groups of people on their own subjects of expertise.
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Jerome Lettvin died on April 23,2011, in Hingham, Massachusetts at the age of 91.