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Supposedly, yes-- during his final stay in the hospital, his brother read to him from a book they'd enjoyed during their childhood, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.
When his brother had to turn the page, John would continue the narration from memory while his brother found his place on the subsequent page. Given that he could be occasionally absent minded, I suspect that it had to be something that piqued his interest, but his sense of what was interesting was extremely broad. He did in fact speculate on the workings of the brain in The Computer and the Brain, which is based on a lecture series he had planned out but did not deliver.
It was more in the context of automata theory, but as someone with an interest in AI, automata, and neuroscience, it was frankly rather dank[0].
A lot of the pioneering work was, and is enjoyable in part because it's original and speculative, so you don't have to master the literature to make sense of it, you can just pick a paper and go. I'd recommend reading Pitts and McCullogh, plus also Lettvin, but others might have some equally lit[1] recommendations. -- 0. In the contemporary sense, c.f. "cool", "dope", or "excellent"; not dank like a root cellar. 1. vide supra |