This topic reminds me of Walter Pitts and specifically his famous paper "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (1959): https://hearingbrain.org/docs/letvin_ieee_1959.pdf

Pitts is probably known to HN readership for his early work on neural networks which put him in dialogue with people like Claude Shannon. It's fascinating to see how much that early world of 1940s/50s era computer researchers overlapped with people literally cutting into animal brains (not to mention experimenting on their own via psychedelics and the like).