What makes one research program croak, and another purr? Touted as the origin point of second-order cybernetics, the 1959 paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” emerged from attempts by MIT’s Warren McCulloch, Jerome Lettvin, and others to apply cybernetic logic to living brains. It claimed that fibers in the frog optic nerve were coded to relay distinct signals to the brain, each having one of a variety of “filters” tailored to the survival needs of the frog. This interpretation was as controversial as the experiment underlying it was capricious; only Lettvin’s sensitive hand could reproduce results, and the group largely abandoned the research. At the same time, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel relocated from Johns Hopkins across the river to Harvard Medical School. Using a similar setup for the cat, they had just published a paper showing direction- specific “receptive fields” in single neurons of the cortex. This became the basis for studies of binocular vision that won them the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Through close reading of the published literature and engagement with oral histories and material from McCulloch’s archive, I argue that although they diverged substantially, these research programs were seen as complementary, particularly in early artificial intelligence research. While the cybernetics group invoked images of mental hardwiring, the Harvard team appealed to higher-order cognition. Such disciplinary distinctions, I suggest, reflect contests within the brain sciences over the character of liberal subjectivity in Cold War America.
