In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” modeling neurons as binary thresholds able to implement logical functions.
The model was highly idealized, but it showed that networks of simple units can compute. It influenced von Neumann, Rosenblatt’s perceptron, and the whole connectionist line.
Together with Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and Shannon’s work, McCulloch–Pitts cast the brain as an information system: a bridge among neuroscience, logic, and later machine learning.
