SESSION 4A PAPER 3 AGATHE TYCHE OF NERVOUS NETS THE LUCKY RECKONERS

His psychiatric training was at Rockland State Hospital (N.Y.), 1932-4. Until 1941 he held several fellowships at Yale University, Laboratory of Neurophysiology, on activity of the central nervous system, becoming Assistant Professor 1940-1. From 1941 to 1952 he was Professor of Psychiatry and Physiology and Neurophysiologist at the University of Illinois. Since 1952 he has been staff member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous articles on functional organization of the brain, and on facilitation, extinction and functional organisation of the cerebral cortex. SUMMARY VENN diagrams, with a jot in every space for all cases in which given logical functions are true, picture their truth tables. These symbols serve as arguments in similar expressions that use similar symbols for functions of functions. When jots appear fortuitously with given probabilities or frequencies, the Venn diagram can be written with l's for fixed jots, O's for fixed absence, and p's for fortuitous jots. Any function is realizable by many synaptic diagrams of formal neurons of specified threshold, and the fortuitous jots of their symbols can be made to signify a perturbation of threshold in an appropriate synaptic diagram. Nets of these neurons with common inputs embody hierarchies of functions, each of which can be reduced to input-output functions pictured in their truth tables.