How Flowcharts Got into the Brain: Diagramming Brains, Minds and Computers Together

该项目由科学、技术与社会计划和美国国家科学基金会生物与社会理事会之间的生物与社会倡议资助，研究流程图在神经科学中的作用。如今，流程图在计算机科学、心理学和神经科学中被广泛使用。尽管流程图等图表在计算机的发展和神经网络、人工智能、认知心理学和神经科学的建立中几乎无处不在，但几乎没有人关注这些图表的历史和用途。该项目考察了视觉图表和流程图对20世纪40年代和70年代计算机、心理学和神经科学发展的影响。发表的报告和档案研究为编程图、流程图、神经模型和大脑模块之间的相互作用的研究提供了基础，因为它们的构思者借用并建立在视觉隐喻和类比之上。该项目与有关绘画和视觉思维方式在科学发展中的重要性的学者合作，研究这些图表和模型是否以及如何在认知神经科学和人工智能研究中实现和约束理论和实验。本项目将通过展示计算机、大脑、人工智能和认知心理学的相互依赖和相互作用，加深我们对计算机、大脑、人工智能和认知心理学的历史发展的理解。这本书有望比以往更丰富、更全面、更平衡地从历史角度把握人-脑-机关系的几个方面，有可能阐明现代科学技术史上的一个关键事件。该项目记录了各种流程图技术，以及阅读和与图表交互的替代方法，这些方法可能值得重新审视。如果成功，当代认知科学家、神经科学家和人工智能研究人员可能会从重新思考他们的图表的意义和使用中直接受益。

This project, supported by the Biology & Society initiative between the Science, Technology & Society Program and the BIO directorate at NSF, examines the role of flowcharts in neurosciences. Flowcharts are commonly used today in computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. Despite the near ubiquity of diagrams like flowcharts in the development of computers and the founding of neural nets, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology and neuroscience, there has been almost no attention paid to the history and uses of those diagrams. This project examines the impact that visual diagrams and flowcharts had on the development of computers, psychology and neuroscience from the 1940s and 1970s. Published reports and archival research provide the basis for this study of the interactions between programming diagrams, flowcharts, neural models, and brain modules, as their conceivers borrowed and built upon visual metaphors and analogies. Engaging with scholarship on the importance of drawing and visual ways of thinking in the growth of science, this project investigates whether and how these diagrams and models enabled and constrained theories and experiments in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence research.This project will augment our understanding of the historical development of computers, brains, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology by demonstrating their sometime dependence and interaction with flow diagrams. It promises a richer, more comprehensive and balanced historical grasp of several aspects of the mind-brain-computer nexus than has hitherto been available, potentially clarifying a key episode in the history of modern science and technology. The project documents the variety of flowchart techniques, as well as alternate ways of reading and interacting with the diagrams that may be worth revisiting. If successful, contemporary cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and AI researchers may benefit directly from rethinking the meaning and use of their diagrams.