Tuesday, August 2, 2011

The genesis of the title

I have loved and admired both Maggie and Jerry for many decades and was able to visit them last summer and share a token 90th birthday cake with him (I reached 90 last fall). Jerry and I worked and published together - his ideas tested in my axon voltage clamp equipment.

They visited me in Woods Hole from time to time. On one occasion they brought the manuscript of his most famous publication to me, then a guest editor of the Proceedings of the IRE. I read and accepted the paper as is but rejected the original title (by Pitts or McCulloch) and insisted that he give me his title. He immediately responded with "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain". I struck out the original title and wrote in Jerry's title and sent it off to the press. The result was that this paper became widely known by almost all neuroscientists in spite of the fact that this journal was not a place they would normally look; nevertheless it has been widely reproduced on the web.

John Moore

No comments:

Post a Comment