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Figure 3.5.
The mirror dance. Source: Holland 1996.
central question addressed here was how the brain goes from atomistic sensory
impressions to a more holistic awareness of the world. In the United States
in 1947 Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch published an influential paper,
“How We Know Universals,” which aimed to explain pattern recognition—for
example, recognizing individual letters of the alphabet independently of their
size and orientation—in terms of a scanning mechanism. More relevant to
Walter, in his 1943 topic
The Nature of Explanation
, Kenneth Craik (1943, 74),
the British experimental psychologist, speculated about the existence of some
cerebral scanning mechanism, always, it seems, explained by an analogy with
TV. “The most familiar example of such a mechanism is in television, where a
space-pattern is most economically converted for transmission into a time se-
quence of impulses by the scanning mechanism of the camera” (Walter 1953,
