Donald O. Hebb facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Donald Olding Hebb
Born	(1904-07-22)July 22, 1904 Chester, Nova Scotia, Canada
Died	August 20, 1985(1985-08-20) (aged 81) Chester, Nova Scotia, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Alma mater	Dalhousie University (BA, 1925), McGill University (MA, 1932), Harvard University (PhD, 1936)
Known for	Cell assembly theory
Awards	Fellow of the Royal Society
Scientific career
Fields	Psychology
Institutions	Montreal Neurological Institute, Queen's University, Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, McGill University
Thesis	The innate organization of visual perception in the rat (1936)
Doctoral advisor	Karl Spencer Lashley
Doctoral students	Brenda Milner

Donald Olding Hebb FRS (born July 22, 1904 – died August 20, 1985) was an important Canadian psychologist. He studied neuropsychology, which is about how the brain affects our thoughts and actions. He wanted to understand how tiny brain cells called neurons help us learn.

Hebb is famous for his idea called Hebbian learning. He wrote about it in his important 1949 book, The Organization of Behavior. Many people call him the "father of neuropsychology" and the "father of neural networks." His ideas helped explain how our brains learn by making connections between groups of neurons.

Early life and education

Donald Hebb was born in Chester, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was the oldest of four children. His parents, Arthur and Clara Hebb, were both medical doctors.

Donald's mother taught him at home until he was 8 years old. She was inspired by the ideas of Maria Montessori, a famous educator. He did very well in elementary school. He finished high school at 16 years old.

He then went to Dalhousie University to study. He first wanted to become a novelist, someone who writes books. In 1925, he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree. After university, he worked as a teacher in his old school in Chester. He also worked on a farm and as a laborer in Quebec.

Career beginnings

In 1928, Donald Hebb started studying at McGill University. At the same time, he became the headmaster of Verdun High School near Montreal. He worked with other university colleagues to make school better. He tried new ways of teaching, like making schoolwork more interesting. He also made sure students saw schoolwork as a special chance to learn.

In 1932, he earned his master's degree in psychology from McGill. His research looked at how our body's reflexes might be linked to learning at a cellular level.

In 1933, Hebb faced a difficult time when his wife passed away. His work at the Montreal school also became challenging. He decided to leave Montreal. He wanted to study how the brain works in more detail.

In 1934, Hebb began studying at the University of Chicago with a famous scientist named Karl Lashley. He then followed Lashley to Harvard University in 1935. At Harvard, he studied how early experiences affect the brain. He raised some rats in the dark and others in the light. He then compared their brains to see how their vision developed. In 1936, he earned his PhD from Harvard.

Brain research and theories

In 1937, Hebb started working at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Here, he studied how brain surgery and injuries affected people's brains. He noticed something important: a child's brain could often recover well after surgery, but similar damage in an adult could be much more serious. This made him realize that outside experiences are very important for how adults think. He found that a lack of new experiences could even cause people to have hallucinations.

Hebb also thought that standard intelligence tests, like the Stanford-Binet IQ test and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, weren't always good for brain surgery patients. He believed tests should look at specific brain functions, not just overall intelligence. So, he helped create new tests, like the Adult Comprehension Test.

Through his work, he found that a part of the brain called the right temporal lobe is important for recognizing things visually. He also discovered that removing large parts of the frontal lobe sometimes had little effect on intelligence. In some cases, patients even showed improvements in personality and thinking ability. This led him to believe that the frontal lobes are most important for learning when we are very young.

In 1939, Hebb became a teacher at Queen's University. To test his ideas about the frontal lobes, he created a special maze for rats with Kenneth Williams. This maze, called the Hebb-Williams maze, is still used today to study animal intelligence. He used it to show that experiences when a rat is young have a lasting effect on its ability to solve problems as an adult. This idea became a key part of developmental psychology, which studies how people grow and change. It also helped support programs like Head Start, which help young children from low-income families.

In 1942, Hebb moved to Florida to work with Karl Lashley again. There, he studied chimpanzees. During this time, he wrote his famous book, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. In this book, he explained that to understand how we behave, we must understand how our brain works.

Return to McGill and later life

Afterward, in 1947, he returned to McGill University as a psychology professor. He became the head of the department in 1948. He continued his work on the human brain with his students, including Brenda Milner.

Hebb retired from McGill in 1972. He moved back to his birthplace in Nova Scotia in 1977. There, he wrote his last book, Essay on Mind. He continued to share his knowledge at Dalhousie University until he passed away in 1985 at age 81.

Honors and awards

Donald Hebb was a member of both the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) and the American Psychological Association (APA). He was the president of the CPA in 1953 and the APA in 1960. In 1961, he won the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.

He was also chosen as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society of London in 1966. Many universities gave him honorary doctorates, including the University of Chicago and Dalhousie University.

The Donald O. Hebb Award is named after him. This award is given each year to a Canadian psychologist who has made important contributions to psychology as a science. Donald Hebb received the first award in 1980.

His old papers and research records are kept at the McGill University Archives in Montreal.

Hebb's major work: The Organization of Behavior (1949)=

Hebb's book The Organization of Behavior is seen as his most important work. It brought together years of his research on brain surgery and human behavior. It helped connect how the brain works physically with how our minds think and perceive things.

Before Hebb, scientists knew that the brain had electrical activity. But they didn't fully understand how the brain recognized things, like how it could recognize circles of different sizes. Older theories couldn't explain how patterns of information became thoughts in our minds.

Hebb's theory, known as Hebbian theory, combined new information about behavior and the brain. He proposed that when two neurons (brain cells) fire together, the connection between them gets stronger. This idea is often simply put as: "Neurons that fire together wire together." This is sometimes called Hebb's Law.

He called groups of neurons that work together "cell-assemblies." These cell-assemblies and their connections form the changing system that guides how our brain responds to what we experience.

Hebb's ideas not only changed how psychologists understood the mind but also helped create artificial neural networks. These are computer systems that try to copy how a living brain works. Even though we now know that brain signals are mostly chemical, modern artificial neural networks still use the idea of electrical signals that Hebb's theory was based on.

Hebb's ideas on education

Hebb believed that psychology should be seen as a biological science, meaning that our thoughts are simply the brain working. His ideas about learning explained that our thoughts and actions come from how our brain cells connect. These ideas greatly influenced his views on education.

Hebb thought that motivation and learning were closely linked. He believed that everything in the brain works together. His theory was that every experience we have causes a group of neurons, a "cell assembly," to become active. These cell assemblies are like our thoughts or ideas. These groups of cells then work together to form "phase sequences," which are like streams of thoughts.

When we experience something again, these cell assemblies and phase sequences can be activated. So, the more interesting and varied our environment is, the more our brain cells grow and learn. This idea was central to his beliefs about education. Hebb felt that a child's environment was very important for learning. Children learn by building up these cell assemblies and phase sequences. A rich environment with many different sensory and motor experiences helps children develop the brain connections needed for learning throughout their lives.

To show this, Hebb and his daughters raised pet rats at home in a stimulating environment. These rats later showed better maze-learning skills as adults. This research helped create programs like Head Start.

Head Start is a program for young children from low-income families. It aims to prepare them for school by giving them early learning activities that stimulate their minds. Studies have shown that children who attend Head Start often have better academic skills, especially if their parents have less education.

Another study followed children for two years and found that a child's home environment and how often they hear language are very important for learning words. Children from homes with fewer resources often learn fewer words and more slowly than children from wealthier homes with more varied language experiences.

Hebb believed that a good learning environment in childhood also helps adult learning. He thought that adults learn quickly because their brain's cell assemblies are already formed. They can then rearrange these connections in new ways. Hebb's theory suggests that every experience we have strengthens connections in our brain. The more we repeat an action or thought, the stronger these connections become. This means that challenging new experiences and practice help create more new connections in our brains.

Hebb as a teacher

Throughout his life, Hebb enjoyed teaching and was very good at it. From his early days as a teacher and headmaster to his later years at McGill University, he was an effective educator. He greatly influenced his students' scientific thinking.

As a professor, he believed that you couldn't teach motivation directly. Instead, you should create the right conditions for students to study and research. He thought students should be judged on their ability to think and create new ideas, not just on how well they could memorize old ones.

Hebb believed in studying the human mind like a biological science. This approach made McGill University a leading place for psychological study.

Hebb also developed the A/S ratio, which is a way to measure the complexity of an organism's brain.

Selected publications

• The Organization of Behaviour. 1949. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN: 978-0-471-36727-7
• Essay on Mind. 1980. Lawrence Erlbaum. ISBN: 978-0-89859-017-3.
• The Conceptual Nervous System. 1982. Pergamon Press. ISBN: 008-027418-8: a collection of 21 papers by Hebb, with a complete list of his publications, edited by Henry A. Buchtel.
• Textbook of Psychology, Textbook of Psychology Students' Handbook (with Don C. Donderi). 1995. Kendall Hunt Pub Co. ISBN: 978-0-7872-1103-5 archive.org

See also

In Spanish: Donald Hebb para niños