Emotional Trauma and Decline
Wiener suddenly turned against McCulloch, on account of his wife Margaret Wiener who hated McCulloch, and broke off relations with anyone connected to him including Pitts. This sent Walter Pitts into 'cognitive suicide', a gradual but steep decline into social isolation, from which he never recovered. He burnt the manuscript on three dimensional networks and took little further interest in work. The only exception was a collaboration with Robert Gesteland which produced a paper on olfaction. Pitts died in 1969 of bleeding esophageal varices, a condition usually associated with cirrhosis.
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