Early Study
See also: ConnectionismEarly treatments of neural networks can be found in Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology, 3rd edition (1872), Theodor Meynert's Psychiatry (1884), William James' Principles of Psychology (1890), and Sigmund Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology (composed 1895). The first rule of neuronal learning was described by Hebb in 1949, Hebbian learning. Thus, Hebbian pairing of pre-synaptic and post-synaptic activity can substantially alter the dynamic characteristics of the synaptic connection and therefore facilitate or inhibit signal transmission. The neuroscientists Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts published the first works on the processing of neural networks called "What the frog's eye tells to the frog's brain." They showed theoretically that networks of artificial neurons could implement logical, arithmetic, and symbolic functions. Simplified models of biological neurons were set up, now usually called perceptrons or artificial neurons. These simple models accounted for neural summation (i.e., potentials at the post-synaptic membrane will summate in the cell body). Later models also provided for excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission.
Read more about this topic: Biological Neural Network
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“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“If the study of all these sciences, which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)