Donald O. Hebb and The Organization of Behavior

Abstract

Donald Olding Hebb completed his BA at Dalhousie University (1925), his MA at McGill University (1932), and his PhD with Karl Lashley at Harvard (1936). He received a fellowship to conduct neuropsychological tests on the patients of Dr. Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute (1937–1939), after which he became a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario (1939–1942). He then worked as a Research Associate of Professor Lashley, studying emotionality in chimpanzees at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Florida (1942–1947), where he began to write his influential book, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory, which introduced the concepts of synaptic change and cell assemblies to account for the neural events underlying behavior. Hebb’s book revolutionized psychology by establishing a biological basis for psychological phenomena. He became a professor of psychology at McGill University in 1947, and completed his book there in 1949. Each of Hebb’s discoveries, from the effects of environmental enrichment and sensory isolation on development, to the severity of brain injury occurring at different ages of development, and the mechanisms of perception, learning, and memory, remains central to understanding how the brain functions. Hebb’s theoretical concepts of synaptic plasticity (the Hebb synapse), the Hebb learning rule, cell assemblies, and phase sequences have become fundamental to understanding the interaction of genes and environment (epigenetics) in the development and degeneration of neural function. The development of computer models of synapse function, graph theory models of cell assemblies, and models for learning in the biomorphic and neuromorphic neural networks that power artificial intelligence, derive from these ideas.