Psychologist, born in Chester, Nova Scotia, SE Canada. He spent most of his academic career at McGill University, Montreal, where he became an influential theorist concerned with the relation between the brain and behaviour. His most important book The Organization of Behavior (1949), was influential in the development of connectionism.
Donald Olding Hebb (July 22, 1904 – August 20, 1985) was a psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning.
Life
Donald Hebb was born in Chester, Nova Scotia, the oldest of four children of Arthur M. Clara (Olding) Hebb, and lived there until the age of 16, when his parents moved to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
Donald's parents were both physicians.
The older of Donald's younger brothers, Andrew, obtained a law degree but went on to a career in journalism and then the insurance business.
At the age of 23, he decided to enter the field of psychology. He asked William Dunlop Tait, the chairman of the pychology department at McGill University (a post Hebb would one day hold) what he'd have to do to get in and was given a reading list and told to come back in a year's time.
In 1928, he became a part-time graduate student at McGill University.
In 1931, Hebb became bedridden due to tuberculosis in his hip. At the very least, the thesis demonstrated the start of a thought process that would later lead to the Hebb synapse. Hebb passed cum laude. Babkin arranged for Hebb to do research on conditioning with Leonid Andreyev, another former member of Pavlov's laboratory.
Between 1933 and 1934, Hebb wrote a booklet titled Scientific Method in Psychology: A Theory of Epistemology Based on Objective Psychology.
By the beginning of 1934, Hebb's life was in a slump. The focus of study at McGill was more in the direction of education and intelligence, and Hebb was now more interested in physiological psychology and was critical of the methodology of the expirements there.
He decided to leave Montreal and wrote to Robert Yerkes at Yale where he was offered a position to study for a PhD. Babkin, however, convinced Hebb to go study with Karl Lashley instead.
In July 1934, Hebb was accepted to study under Karl Lashley at the University of Chicago. Hebb, along with two other students, followed Lashley to Harvard University in September, 1935.
For the duration of the next year, he worked as a research assistant to Lashly and as a teaching assistant in introductory psychology for Edwin G.
In 1937, Hebb married his second wife, Elizabeth. That same year, on a tip from his sister Catherine (herself a PhD student with Babkin at McGill University), he applied to work with Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Here he researched the effect of brain surgery and injury on human brain function.
He also became critical of the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler intelligence tests for use with brain surgery patients. These tests were designed to measure overall intelligence, whereas Hebb believed tests should be designed to measure more specific effects that surgery could have had on the patient.
Putting the Picture Anomaly Test to use, he provided the first indication that the right temporal lobe was involved in visual recognition.
In 1939, he was appointed to a teaching position at Queen's University.
In 1942, he moved to Orange Park, Florida to once again work with Karl Lashley who had replaced Yerkes as the Director of the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Here, studying primate behaviour, Hebb developed emotional tests for chimpanzees. During the course of the work there, Hebb wrote The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory, his ground-breaking book which set forth the theory that the only way to explain behaviour was in terms of brain function.
Afterwards, he returned to McGill University to become a professor of psychology in 1947 and was made chairman of the department in 1948. Here, he once again worked with Penfield, but this time through his students, which included Mortimer Mishkin, Haldor Enger Rosvold, and Brenda Milner, all of whom extended his earlier work with Penfield on the human brain.
Hebb remained at McGill until retirement in 1972.
Hebb was a member of the American Psychological Association (APA) and was its president in 1960.
Donald Hebb died in 1985, two years after his wife, in Nova Scotia. He Was survived by two daughters, Mary Ellen Hebb and Jane Hebb Paul.
The Donald O. Hebb Award, named in his honor, is awarded to distinguished Canadian scientists.
Work
The Organization of Behavior (1949)
This work is considered Hebb's most important. A combination of his years of work in brain surgery mixed with his study of human behavior, it finally brought together the two realms of human perception that for a long time could not be connected properly. That is, the biological function of the brain as an organ together with the higher function of the mind.
There were many theories on how the brain and the mind were connected. The problem with the theory was that it was assumed that signals travel one way to the brain.
In 1929, Hans Berger discovered that the mind exhibits continuous electrical activity and cast doubt on the Pavlovian model of perception and response because, now, there appeared to be something going on in the brain even without much stimulus.
At the same time, there were many mysteries.
Another theory, the Gestalt theory, stated that signals to the brain established a sort of field.
The behaviorist theories at the time did well at explaining how the processing of patterns happened.
Hebb combined up to date data about behavior and the mind into a single theory. And, while the understanding of the anatomy of the brain did not advance much since the development of the older theories on the operation of the brain, he was still able to piece together a theory that got a lot of the important functions of the brain right.
His theory became known as Hebbian theory and the models which follow this theory are said to exhibit Hebbian learning. This method of learning is best expressed by this quote from the book:
This is more often paraphrased as "Neurons that fire together wire together."
The combination of neurons which could be grouped together as one processing unit, Hebb referred to as "cell-assemblies".
Not only did Hebb's model for the working of the mind influence how psychologists understood the processing of stimuli within the mind, but it also opened up the way for the creation of computational machines that mimicked the biological processes of a living nervous system. And while the method of signal transmission in a nervous system was later found to be due to a complex interaction of chemicals, modern artificial neural networks are still based on the transmission of signals via electrical impulses that Hebbian theory was first designed around.
Hebb as an educator
Throughout his life Hebb enjoyed and was very successful as a teacher. Both in his early years as a teacher and a headmaster in a Montreal school and in his later years at McGill University, he proved to be a very effective educator and a great influence on the scientific minds which were then his students.
As a professor at McGill, he believed that you could not teach motivation. You could train them to write, help them choose a problem to study, and even help keep them undistracted, but the motivation and passion for research and study had to come from the student.
Hebb believed in a very objective study of the human mind, more as a study of a biological science.
Hebb also came up with the A/S ratio, a value that measures the brain complexity of an organism.
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