Warren Sturgis McCulloch was born in Orange, New Jersey on the 16th of November 1898. He originally planned to join the Christian ministry as a teenager before shifting his path to philosophy and psychology at Yale University.
Warren Sturgis McCulloch published A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics Volume 5 in 1943. This document described memories forming through neural networks containing loops that were equivalent to sentences in first-order logic with equality.
Bailey, Bonin, and Warren Sturgis McCulloch conducted studies identifying connections in macaque brains and examined chimpanzee brains using strychnine neuronography during the 1940s. They published these results through the University of Illinois Press in 1950 after analyzing the isocortex of the chimpanzee.
Warren Sturgis McCulloch moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge in 1952 to work alongside Norbert Wiener at the Research Laboratory of Electronics. His team studied the visual system of the frog and discovered how the eye provides information already organized to a degree before reaching the brain.
Warren Sturgis McCulloch posited poker chip reticular formations as the mechanism handling conflict when ambiguity exists in decision-making processes. These structures functioned like democratic neural networks with somatotopical organization and switched between unambiguous stable modes based on ambiguous inputs.