#jerry lettvin

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W Daniel Hillis – How Jerry Lettvin talked me out of neurobiology (73/248)

[etirabys]

And this is one of these mad geniuses of neuroscience, a guy at MIT named Jerry Lettvin. What he did was, as far as I can tell, sit around in a dark, sort of abandoned warehouse, for decades on end, and about once every decade he would write a paper that would transform neuroscience. I met the guy once, and it was one of the more terrifying experiences I've had. I was working in a lab where I had to go get an oscilloscope from someplace, because ours was broken. And everybody agreed that the place to find it was in Jerry Lettvin's warehouse, because he lived with oscilloscopes. I went in there, it was basically pitch dark, and there was this sweaty, Sydney Greenstreet kind of guy sitting there, in a ripped t-shirt, and he'd been in there for decades. He was chain smoking and sweating, because it was like 150 degrees.

– sapolsky in a neuro lecture

what are biologists

[tachtutor]

AI has a specific Spider-Man 'brain cell' just like humans do

AI has a specific Spider-Man ‘brain cell’ just like humans do

By Matthew Sparkes AIs can associate pictures of Spider-Man with actual spiders AF archive/Alamy When an artificial intelligence sees a picture of the comic book hero Spider-Man, it can conjure the idea of a spider – an advanced connection that humans make and that now seems to be happening in neural networks designed to mimic our brains. In the 1960s, neuroscientist Jerry Lettvin proposed that…

[jawohl-herrkaleun]

Σ Ξ MAN MET A Π MAN After many "if"s and "but"s, emendations, notes, and cuts, they bring their theory, complete, to lay, for Science, at his feet. But Science, sad to say it, he seldom heeds the laity abstractedly he flips his hand, mutters "metaphysic" and bends himself again to start another curve on another chart. "Come," says Pitts, "his line is laid; the only points he'll miss, we've made."

Jerry Lettvin

[brainpodcast]

Episode 47 - Becoming A Curious Scientist with Dr. André Fenton

What’s the most important thing about being a scientist? According to Dr. André Fenton: Curiosity. Anthony and André talked about how André tinkered his way to researching learning and memory at NYU.

André mentioned this famous article by Jerry Lettvin - What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain

Here’s an article about the interesting story of PKMzeta, a molecule André has been studying for over a decade.

Music on today’s episode by Sure

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[scripta-elegans]

JERRY (JEROME) LETTVIN (1920 - 2011), MIT professor of electrical and bioengineering and communications physiology, M.D., psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and engineer, was known for his seminal paper “What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain”, as well as for speculating on the concept of “Grandmother cells” in the cerebral cortex, for publicly debating the use of LSD on TV with Timothy Leary on a few minutes notice, and for being a poet, translator, provocateur, and legendary MIT lecturer.  (Lettvin photo above copyright Arnold Newman.)

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Copyright 1970 - 2010 by David W. Lettvin

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http://neuron.duke.edu/Lettvin/

Jerry Lettvin's MIT obituary