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Lettvin

Sep 25, 2011
Patrick Henry Winston ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’70
slice.mit.edu
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I especially like the one about the time when his wife, Maggie, left him at home to mind their three children. When she came home, the children were sitting motionless, staring off into the distance. “What have you done,” she said. It turned out that he had hypnotized them so he could get some work done.

Once, when I was an undergraduate, I screwed up my courage and went to ask him if he had anything I could do. His reply: ``Have you read Helmholtz?'' Not realizing that this was one of his standard tests of resolve, I dutifully bought the two volumes of Helmholtz and started to read. Because it was more than 1000 pages, I never finished and never became his student.

When I became a Professor, Jerry always called me Tom. I felt twice honored: first that he recognized me consistently; second that he seemed to be confusing me with Tom Knight,whom I much respect.

Years later, when I started teaching my boutique, seminar-style subject on computational accounts of human intelligence, I always invited Jerry in, not to lecture, but rather to answer questions and reminisce about his life as a scientist. The students had just read Jerry's seminal, 1959 paper, “What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain.”

One year he told the story of the German Scientists. To me, the story reflected what Jerry was all about: big ideas rather than incrementalism, blue-collar dress rather than sartorialism, meritocracy rather than pedigree.

Here is the story as Jerry told it: He got a call one day from a friend in California. The friend said, “I have some foreign visitors who have not been able to duplicate your frog experiment. They are planning to publish a paper that claims your work is a fraud. Will you come show them the technique?”

“Do they wear white lab coats?” Jerry asked.

“Yes.”

“Are they Germans?”

“Yes.”

“I'll come.”

Jerry spent some time deciding what to wear. He finally settled on a thoroughly stained yellow dress shirt and grubby, well-worn work pants.

When he showed up, he was escorted into the experiment room. He reported that the place looked more like an operating room for open heart surgery on humans than a place to stick needles into the optic nerves of frogs.

“We have assembled some instruments for you,” said his friend, pointing to an immaculate tray of scalpels, clamps, and other paraphernalia.

“That's ok,” said Jerry, “I brought my own.” Then, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of needle-nose pliers and a pair of diagonal cutters.

A minute or two later, with the frog prepared, the German scientists were waiting skeptically to see if anything at all would come out of the speakers attached to the amplifier attached to the needle Jerry had stuck into the frog.

Then, Jerry passed black dot the size of a fly past the frog's eye.

“Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrup.”

Editor's Note: Read about Jerry Lettvin's life in an MIT New Office article.

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Comments

Kia Corticale

Sat, 01/16/2016 7:38am

It's interesting to me that progress on the frog's neural coding, and its application to the human brain, hasn't expanded in the many years since Lettvin's analysis and findings.

Jonathan D. Lettvin

Tue, 04/19/2016 8:09pm

I beg to differ. Much progress has been made on the frog's neural coding and its application to the human brain. I just haven't published any of what I do. Jerry, Campbell Searle and I had daily hours long debates from 2002 to 2011, and using my software modeling skills, I am his unpapered last graduate student (except for the paper I delivered at his memorial).

Just this month I annotated one of his papers as background:
http://rawgit.com/jlettvin/JYL/master/seen.movement.html
(use google chrome, apple safari, MS Edge, but NOT MSIE).

I model neurons and show causal relations between Jerry's findings and neuron shapes. Here is one of my models used for hyperacute vision in broad spectrum images subject to refraction and diffraction, related to the seen movement paper:
http://rawgit.com/jlettvin/Tubulin/master/bipolar.unique.path.html

I do this for fun, without much appetite to publish. However, with my father's prodding and blessing, I have achieved much. I have significant analyses of vision, and rudimentary analyses of audition, olfaction, and other senses. I've also begun analyses of motor signaling including emergent behavior management of the twitch duty cycle to support smooth tonus.

For the most part I ignore "brain" as I see it as a layering atop the reflex arc from senory to motor with largely similar rules for structure and function. Analysis of spinal cord has been very productive, but there is more to learn than I have yet imagined.

I am about to annotate the "Multiple Meanings in Single Visual Units" paper. If anyone cares to learn more, I am open to discussion. Better yet, I would consider having one or another formal relationship to a group wanting to advance what I have done.

I miss him very much. Here is the poem I wrote for his memorial:

You'll not from quaint and curious volumes quote forevermore
nor pull electrodes from raw stock nor credit card your door.
No octopus nor frog nor cat will know your twitching hand.
No student's eye will open wide to see what you've unplanned.

Dissenters now go undefended. Strange guests don't stay late.
More zebras go undiagnosed 'though frank in tic and gait.
We'll miss how wrong our theories are when we're so sure they're right.
Without you we are all alone. There's none like you to fight.

John T. Fitch '52

Sat, 10/29/2011 7:39pm

Back in 1965, I interviewed Jerry Lettvin for the "M.I.T. Science Reporter" TV series. After the WGBH crew had the cameras and lights all set up, Prof. Lettvin picked up a frog and gave it a shot of curare, so that it would be paralyzed and therefor not jump off the table, but awake with a probe in its brain, so that it could respond to a "bug" passing its field of vision. (He requested that we not mention the curare on the program.) The other incident I remember was having to stop the recording, because he had suddenly started talking about whales, when we were supposed to be talking about frog vision. He had such an encyclopedic store of knowledge that I guess it was difficult to confine himself to the subject at hand. Anyway, it was a fascinating program, but the only copy I know of is at the Library of Congress. I think the M.I.T. Museum is trying to get copies of it and other programs in the series.

Tim Carney

Sat, 10/29/2011 2:40pm

So there we were, at the first meeting of 21.592 (or some such designation) all about Brain and Behavior, the Mind-Body Problem in Contemporary Guise. Jerry Lettvin was impressario. Guys would bring dates from liberal arts schools to show that MIT had couth.

Right out of the box, Jerry asked what "mind" was. A coed immediately responded without fear, babbling something about RNA. Short-circuiting the flow, Jerry wondered aloud whether she had walked across a cow pasture on the way to class...

A session or two later we were repeating the mapping of a frog's visual field.

H. L. Levingston

Wed, 10/26/2011 8:23pm

I vividly remember watching the Timothy Leary-Jerry Lettvin debate and being shocked by his most appropriate retort: BULLSHIT, to Leary. The last time I saw Jerry was about a year ago. He and his wife, Maggie, were waiting their turn in our ophthalmologist's office. They both looked old and tired (so do I); one was in a wheel chair, and I recall that Jerry had a patch over one eye. We spoke, I reminded him of the debate - he chuckled, I told Maggie I had watched her doing Yoga on TV - she chuckled. I spoke of meeting Jerry's brother, a concert pianist, on a flight to Boston from Cleveland, and we just chatted amicably as though we were best friends and it was 20 years ago. I miss them both.

Chris Linn

Tue, 09/27/2011 3:23am

As the director of the Concourse program back in my freshman year (1983), Jerry was one of my first impressions of MIT. We we mesmerized as he chain-smoked his way through the Concourse Friday seminar (basically, Jerry's story hour).

I remember hanging out in his Building 20 lab. It was a wreck. In the middle was a huge lab table piled a foot high with papers and gadgets. Jerry was on the phone a lot, arguing, yelling, joking. Never a dull moment.

Lawrence J. Krakauer

Mon, 09/26/2011 8:53pm

I once had the great pleasure of driving Jerry, along with his friend Leonid Hambro, to New York. Leonid, a classical musician who was staff pianist for the New York radio station WQXR, was a friend of my parents. He had come to the Boston area to perform a concert with Victor Borge, and bummed a ride back to NY with me.

Jerry Lettvin was a friend of Leonid's, and was heading for the Cold Springs Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology to present a paper. He seized the occasion to get a free ride to NY with me, and to have time to chat with Leonid on the trip.

We picked up Jerry at his home. Maggie intercepted him as he came out the front door, complaining that his shirt had a big stain on it. She made him go back upstairs and change. Then, when he re-appeard in a clean shirt, she pulled out a comb, and combed his hair neatly as he walked out the front door.

How she imagined this would survive an over four-hour trip to NY, I don't know. In fact, as soon as we were around the corner, Jerry absentmindedly tousled his hair, bringing back its full Albert Einstein glory.

As the driver, I was a fly on the wall, saying very little and listening to these two fascinating men converse.

Lawrence J. Krakauer

Mon, 09/26/2011 8:32pm

I guess Jerry had more than one tenacity test that he applied to prospective graduate students:

In the mid sixties, I was searching for a field of study in which to do research for a Ph.D. at MIT, and I talked to Professor Lettvin. In 1959, he had been the primary author of the classic paper, "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain", which had shone a bright light on neural coding in a frog's optic nerve. He had since been considering how one might proceed from an understanding of signalling in the peripheral nerves to an understanding of the brain itself. Since this seemed to me to be an area ripe for advancement, I thought it might be a good field to work in.

The trouble was, the conclusion Lettvin had been coming to was that the task was, at the time, hopeless. He told me to read a book called "The Biology of Stentor", by Vance Tartar, and come back if I was still interested. I found the book to be out of print, but I was nevertheless able to buy a used copy. It was a thick tome that collected everything that was known about a particular animal, the stentor. This included traits such as an ability to develop conditioned reflexes, like the salivation of Pavlov's dogs. One might expect that this would require some critical number of neurons and synapses in the animal's nervous system.

Except the Stentor had no nervous system. It had no neurons and synapses. The stentor is a single-celled animal. Lettvin's point was that if a single-celled animal could exhibit that much complexity of behavior, what hope did we have of ever understanding the human brain?

Well, he sure scared me off. I went back to the Artificial Intelligence group to work with computers. They're simple.

---------
The above was first posted on my Memoirs and Musings blog at:

http://ljkrakauer.com/LJK/40s50s/ovaltine.htm

George McQuilken '65

Mon, 09/26/2011 6:20pm

Did the tell the tale of his debate with Timothy Leary? That was the first time I heard the word "bullshit" on TV (educational TV of course).

Ann McBain Ezzell

Mon, 09/26/2011 3:50pm

I remember 2 things about his class:

1. "Nerves twitch"

2. Seeing a pack of cigarettes (Lucky Strikes) in the pocket of his short-sleeved white shirt. And occasionally watching him bum a cigarette from one of the students.

I expect I also learned something useful at some point in the class, but 38+ years down the road, those are my memories.