Jerome Lettvin

Jerome Ysroael Lettvin (born Chicago, February 231920) is a cognitive scientist and professor Emeritus of Electrical and Bioengineering and Communications Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Jerome Lettvin is best known as author of "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain", (1959) one of the most cited papers in the Science Citation Index. He wrote it along with Humberto Maturana, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. He carried out neurophysiological studies in the spinal cord, made the first demonstration of "feature detectors" in the visual system, and studied information processing in the terminal branches of single axons.

Jerome Lettvin is popularly known as Jerry, and is the author of many published articles on subjects varying from neurology and physiology to philosophy and politics.



Early life
Jerry was born February 23, 1920 in Chicago as eldest of four children (including pianist Theodore Lettvin) to Solomon and Fanny Lettvin. Trained as a neurologist and psychiatrist, he practiced medicine at the battle of the Bulge during World War II. After the war, he continued practicing neurology and researching nervous systems, partly at Boston City Hospital, and then at MIT with Walter Pitts and Warren McCullough under Norbert Wiener.

Scientific philosophy
Jerry Lettvin considers any experiment a failure from which the experimental animal does not recover to a comfortable happy life. He is one of the very few neurophysiologists that have successfully recorded pulses from unmyelinated vertebrate axons. His main approach to scientific observation seems to be "reductio ad absurdum"; or find the least observation that contradicts a key assumption in the proposed theory. This has led to unusual experiments being performed.

He has made a careful study of the work of Leibniz, discovering that he had constructed a mechanical computer in the 1600s, amongst other creations hundreds of years ahead of his time. Jerome Lettvin is also known for his friendship with the genius cognitive scientist and logician Walter Pitts, a polymath who first showed the relationship between the philosophy of Leibniz, universal computing and "A Logical Calculus Immanent in Nervous Activity".

He continues to research the properties of nervous systems.

Unusual Experiments

 * vertebrate axons exhibit sub-millisecond triphasic spikes; action potentials are found at nodes of Ranvier but are absent in Remak fibers


 * a cut optic nerve trained to the olfactory lobe regrows, remapping the retina; senses appear to direct brain growth rather than the reverse


 * axonal stimulation backfires into the cell body; action potentials can travel from axons to the axon hillock and into the cell


 * stimulating the bulbo-reticular inhibitory system stops strychnine convulsions; reflexes have system-wide attenuation controls


 * axon pulse intervals can be separated into bands; some form of information is encoded in pulse intervals


 * color constancy derives from boundaries and vertices in motion over the retina; color is not related to wavelength


 * images stationary on the retina fade to invisible; movement is critical to vision


 * visible insects cause no nervous activity in a frog that sees a duck; attention obeys hierarchical rules

Politics
Jerry is a firm advocate of individual rights and heterogeneous society. His father nurtured these views with ideas from Kropotkin's book "Mutual Aid". He has been expert witness in trials in both the U.S. and in Israel always on behalf of individual rights.

During the antiwar riots of the 1960s he helped negotiate agreements between police and protesters. He deplores when law is made using false science and false statistics, or when proper observations are distorted for advantage.

When the American Academy of Arts and Sciences withdrew its award of the annual Emerson-Thoreau medal from Ezra Pound for his leanings during World War II, Jerry resigned from the academy, in which letter he wrote "It is not art that concerns you but politics, not taste but special interest, not excellence but propriety."

Quotes

 * "I love things complexly because they are complex."


 * "Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which otherwise require harder thinking."


 * "Give me a helical lever and a place to stand and I will screw the world."


 * Upon his resignation (evidently in frustration) from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: "At this time, nausea overtakes me and I resign [from the Academy]."

Anecdotes/Factoids
Jerry had a brief stint writing horror pictures in Hollywood.

He co-developed an anti-wiretapping device which he nearly sold to the Mafia (or "my friends the bookies" depending on what mood he's in when telling the story). He was prevented from doing so by the military, and his plans for this device became classified.

When building 20 was torn down, Jerry was dismayed to find that he wasn't allowed to smoke inside his new office. He moved his office to a janitor's shed on top of the newer building, where he could continue his smoking habit in relative peace.

In 1967, Jerry debated Timothy Leary about the merits of LSD. Jerry hurled the timeless epithet "BULLSHIT!" at Leary, who was sitting in the lotus position near a candle. This in response to Leary (a licensed psychologist) characterizing the frank symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy as a religious experience.

While working in the Marine Zoological Station in Naples, Italy, he had a 30 foot long room in which octopus holding tanks were kept, with fine mesh metal screens to keep them from escaping. One tank, at the far end, held his youngest son's pet octopus named juvenile delinquent (JD). One day he teased JD with a stick. The next morning, his son and he came to the door and noticed a puddle under the door. Fearing the worst (broken tanks), he opened the door, and was greeted by a blast of water in his face (but not his son's face). From across the room, and through the screen, JD had perfect aim, after which he jetted to the bottom of the tank, inked it up, and hid for the rest of the day. Still confused about the water under the door, Jerry looked at the back of the door and saw a spot of water at the height of his face. JD had been practicing for revenge. From this, and other experiences, Jerry concluded that an octopus is highly intelligent, and from that time on, he never ate octopus again, out of respect for octopus as colleagues.

His translations of Morgenstern's poems from German retain the playfulness of the originals.

His wife, Maggie Lettvin, was so badly injured in an automobile accident that doctors predicted she would be a permanent cripple. Within a year, she recovered the ability to walk, and within another year or so, she began conducting an exercise program on a local television station.