shelf of nineteen primary documents, each introduced at length: what it is, where to read it (free, where a stable free copy exists), what it says, what is contested, the methodological critiques, and what came after. The documents are linked, not copied; quotations are short and checked against the source, and summaries of an argument are labelled.

machines and minds

	Shannon, 1948 — a theory of communication, and the first small language model
	the perceptron, 1958 — a newspaper report, a paper, and a forecast
	Turing, 1950 — the imitation game, and the arguments about what passing would show

control and purpose

	Maxwell, 1868 — On Governors: stability as the roots of an equation
	Rosenblueth, Wiener & Bigelow, 1943 — purpose as negative feedback, and Taylor's reply

memory, perception and report

	Pfungst, 1907 — Clever Hans: a horse, a question, and the first great control experiment
	Bartlett, 1932 — Remembering: the War of the Ghosts, and memory as reconstruction
	Sperling, 1960 — partial report, iconic memory, and the overflow debate
	Libet et al., 1983 — the readiness potential, the clock, and the veto

the nervous system

	Harlow, 1868 — Phineas Gage, twenty years on
	Sherrington, 1906 — The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, and a word for a gap
	Hodgkin & Huxley, 1952 — four equations for the nerve impulse
	Scoville & Milner, 1957 — H.M., and loss of recent memory
	Lettvin et al., 1959 — what the frog's eye tells the frog's brain
	Hubel & Wiesel, 1959 — lines and edges in the cat's cortex

art and its makers

	Baudelaire, 1859 — photography as the arts' humble servant
	Lovelace, 1843 — Note G, and what an engine can originate
	The Blind Man, 1917 — the Richard Mutt case: he chose it
	Freud, 1919 — the uncanny, Jentsch's dolls, and Mori's valley

nearby

	the instrument cabinet — the apparatus, not the papers
	timeline: cybernetics — governors to good regulators
	timeline: memory — Ebbinghaus to reconsolidation
	timeline: neuroscience — a silver stain to a fly's wiring
	annotated bibliographies — shelves of checked sources
	the reading room — fragments and essays