1904–1985 · psychologist, Montreal

he Canadian psychologist Donald Olding Hebb was a schoolteacher before he was a scientist. He took his doctorate at Harvard in 1936 under Karl Lashley, worked with Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute studying patients after brain surgery, and spent most of his career at McGill.

what he did

The Organization of Behavior (Hebb, D. O., 1949) proposed that when one cell repeatedly helps to fire another, the connection between them grows stronger, and that groups of cells strengthened this way, cell assemblies, are the physical form of ideas and memories. The slogan "cells that fire together wire together" is a later summary, not Hebb's phrase.

what came of it

The rule was a guess about synapses no one could yet measure. Bliss and Lømo found lasting strengthening, long-term potentiation, in 1973; later work showed the order of firing matters, down to milliseconds (Markram et al., 1997)(Bi & Poo, 1998). His student Brenda Milner went on to study H.M.; Frank Rosenblatt built Hebb-like learning into the perceptron.

why he is here

Almost every learning rule in neural networks is a descendant or a rival of Hebb's. See the engram.

in the tour: the room called "The assembly and the engram" has a placard called "Where is it kept" ···

Primary works and sources

1. Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. New York: Wiley.
2. Bliss & Lømo (1973). Long‐lasting potentiation of synaptic transmission in the dentate area of the anaesthetized rabbit following stimulation of the perforant path. The Journal of Physiology. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1973.sp010273
3. Markram et al. (1997). Regulation of Synaptic Efficacy by Coincidence of Postsynaptic APs and EPSPs. Science. doi:10.1126/science.275.5297.213
4. Bi & Poo (1998). Synaptic Modifications in Cultured Hippocampal Neurons: Dependence on Spike Timing, Synaptic Strength, and Postsynaptic Cell Type. The Journal of Neuroscience. doi:10.1523/jneurosci.18-24-10464.1998

see also

	the engram
	Karl Lashley — his teacher
	Brenda Milner — his student