• DOI:10.1037/H0087295
• Corpus ID: 145251164

The Hebb legacy.

@article{Klein1999TheHL,
  title={The Hebb legacy.},
  author={Raymond M. Klein},
  journal={Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology},
  year={1999},
  volume={53},
  pages={1-3}
}

• R. Klein
• Published 1 March 1999
• Psychology
• Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology

Donald Olding Hebb (1904-1985) was, during his lifetime, an extraordinarily influential figure for the discipline of psychology. His principled opposition to radical behaviourism and emphasis on understanding what goes on between stimulus and response (perception, learning, thinking) helped clear the way for the cognitive revolution. His view of psychology as a biological science and his neuropsychological cell-assembly proposal rejuvenated interest in physiological psychology. Since his death, Hebb's seminal ideas exert an ever-growing influence on those interested in mind (cognitive science), brain (neuroscience), and how brains implement mind (cognitive neuroscience). Raised in Chester, Nova Scotia, Hebb graduated from Dalhousie University in 1925. He aspired to write novels, but chose the more practical field of education and quickly became a school principal in the Province of Quebec. The writings of James, Freud, and Watson stimulated his interest in psychology, and as a part-time graduate student at McGill University, Hebb was exposed to Pavlov's program. Unimpressed, Hebb was "softened up for [his] encounter with Kohler's Gestalt Psychology and Lashley's critique of reflexology." Hebb went to work with Lashley, and in 1936 completed his PhD at Harvard on the effects of early visual deprivation upon size and brightness perception in the rat. He accepted Wilder Penfield's offer of a fellowship at the Montreal Neurological Institute where he explored the impact of brain injury and surgery, particularly lesions of the frontal lobes, on human intelligence and behaviour. From his observations that removal of large amounts of tissue might have little impact on memory and intelligence, Hebb inferred a widely distributed neural substrate. At Queen's University, Hebb developed human and animal intelligence tests, including the "Hebb-Williams" maze, which has subsequently been used to investigate the intelligence of many different species in hundreds of studies (Brown & Stanford, 1997), making it the "Stanford-Binet" of comparative intelligence. Hebb's studies of intelligence led him to the conclusion that experience played a much greater role in determining intelligence than was typically assumed (Hebb, 1942). He would later point out that every bit of behaviour is jointly determined by heredity and environment, just as the area of a field is jointly determined by its length and its width (Hebb, 1953). In 1942 Hebb rejoined Lashley, who had become director of the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology. There Hebb explored fear, anger, and other emotional processes in the chimpanzee. Stimulated by the intellectual climate at the Yerkes Laboratory, Hebb began writing a book synthesizing different lines of research into a "general theory of-behavior that attempts to bridge the gap between neurophysiology and psychology" (Hebb, 1949, vii). Hebb returned to McGill as Professor of Psychology and in 1948 was appointed chair. His book, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory, wielded a kind of magic in the years after its appearance (Hebb, 1949). It attracted many brilliant scientists into psychology, made McGill University a North American mecca for scientists interested in brain mechanisms of behaviour, led to many important discoveries, and steered contemporary psychology onto a more fruitful path. For Hebb "the problem of understanding behavior is the problem of understanding the total action of the nervous system, and vice versa" (1949, p. xiv) and his advocacy of an interdisciplinary effort to solve this neuropsychological problem was his most general theme. When Hebb's book was published, physiological psychology was in decline, and there was a growing movement in psychology to reject physiological concepts (Skinner, 1938). The Organization of Behavior marked a turning point away from this trend. Metaphors, using non-biological devices with well-understood properties, figure prominently in the history of attempts to explain behaviour and thought. …