Music, Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience

Aside from historical references to the Early Greek philosophers and since then a long line of sci-fi authors and stories of mental illnesses running rampant, the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Neuroscience waited until the mid-twentieth century before gaining their current titles and credence in academia, research, and knowledge of their existence among the populace as a whole (Nilsson in The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2010). Certainly, people like von Neumann and Turing in AI and Skinner and Chomsky in Psychology had great theories, some of which are still in vogue, but it took John McCarthy to invent the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. Several prominent Neuroscience organizations (study of the human nervous system and brain) were formed during that same period and later: e.g., the International Society for Neurochemistry in 1963, the European Brain and Behaviour Society in 1968, and the Society for Neuroscience in 1969.