Closing Dewey's Circuit

One hundred and twenty years ago, the American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey published his seminal paper The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology in the Psychological Review. In this essay Dewey claims that the model of a reflex arc is a misguided and partial concept; “what we have is a circuit, not an arc or broken segment of a circle,” says Dewey, who termed this complete circuit coordination—a dynamic sensory-motor process that underlies perception. Despite extensive evidence demonstrating the necessary connection between action and sensation, the arc paradigm Dewey opposed remains to this day the guiding framework to which almost all neuroscientific endeavors adhere to. This bias stems from the prevailing experimental methodology and in particular, from the definitions of stimulus and response. Here we propose closed-loop methodology, complemented by Dewey's functional definitions of stimulus and response, as a possible framework for the advancement of the dynamical circuit interpretation.