21 Facts About Jerry Lettvin

Jerome Ysroael Lettvin, often known as Jerry Lettvin, was an American cognitive scientist, and Professor of Electrical and Bioengineering and Communications Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jerry 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.

Jerry 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.

Jerry Lettvin was the author of many published articles on subjects varying from neurology and physiology to philosophy and politics.

Jerry Lettvin was born February 23,1920, in Chicago, the eldest of four children of Solomon and Fanny Jerry Lettvin, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine.

Jerry Lettvin considered any experiment a failure from which the experimental animal does not recover to a comfortable happy life.

Jerry Lettvin was one of the very few neurophysiologists who successfully recorded pulses from unmyelinated vertebrate axons.

Jerry 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.

In short, Jerry Lettvin's group discovered that a lot of what was thought to happen in the brain actually happened in the eye itself.

Jerry 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.

Jerry Lettvin made a careful study of the work of Leibniz, discovering that he had constructed a mechanical computer in the late 17th century.

Jerry 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.

Jerry Lettvin continued to research the properties of nervous systems throughout his life, culminating in his study of ion dynamics in axon cytoskeleton.

Jerry Lettvin was a firm advocate of individual rights and heterogeneous society.

Jerry Lettvin's father nurtured these views with ideas from Kropotkin's book Mutual Aid.

Jerry Lettvin became an expert witness in trials in both the United States and in Israel, always on behalf of individual rights.

Jerry Lettvin deplored the making of laws based on false science and false statistics, and the distortion of observations for political or economic advantage.

On May 3,1967, in the Kresge Auditorium at MIT, Jerry Lettvin debated with Timothy Leary about the merits and dangers of LSD.

Jerry Lettvin took the position that LSD is a dangerous molecule that should not be used.

Jerry 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.

Jerry Lettvin died on April 23,2011, in Hingham, Massachusetts at the age of 91.