Donald O. Hebb
Donald Olding Hebb FRS[1] (July 22, 1904 – August 20, 1985) was a Canadian 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. He is best known for his theory of Hebbian learning, which he introduced in his classic 1949 work The Organization of Behavior.[3] He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks.[4] A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hebb as the 19th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[5] His views on learning described behavior and thought in terms of brain function, explaining cognitive processes in terms of connections between neuron assemblies.
Donald Olding Hebb
July 22, 1904
August 20, 1985 (aged 81)
Canadian
Dalhousie University (BA, 1925),
McGill University (MA, 1932),
Harvard University (PhD, 1936)
Psychology
Early life[edit]
Donald Hebb was born in Chester, Nova Scotia, the oldest of four children of Arthur M. and M. Clara (Olding) Hebb, and lived there until the age of 16, when his parents moved to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
Hebb's parents were both medical doctors. Donald's mother was heavily influenced by the ideas of Maria Montessori, and she home-schooled him until the age of 8. He performed so well in elementary school that he was promoted to the 7th grade at 10 years of age but, as a result of failing and then repeating the 11th grade in Chester, he graduated from the 12th grade at 16 years of age from Halifax County Academy. (Many or most of the single class of grade 9, 10 and 11 students at the Chester school failed the provincial examinations. Those in 9th and 10th grades were permitted to advance despite their failure but there was no 12th grade in Chester.) He entered Dalhousie University aiming to become a novelist. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1925. Afterward, he became a teacher, teaching at his old school in Chester. Later, he worked on a farm in Alberta and then traveled around, working as a laborer in Quebec.
Career[edit]
In 1928, he became a graduate student at McGill University. But, at the same time, he was appointed headmaster of Verdun High School in the suburbs of Montreal.[6] He worked with two colleagues from the university, Kellogg and Clarke, to improve the situation. He took a more innovative approach to education—for example, assigning more interesting schoolwork and sending anyone misbehaving outside (making schoolwork a privilege). He completed his master's degree in psychology at McGill in 1932 under the direction of the eminent psychologist Boris Babkin. Hebb's master's thesis, entitled Conditioned and Unconditioned Reflexes and Inhibition, tried to show that skeletal reflexes were due to cellular learning.[7]
By the beginning of 1934, Hebb's life was in a slump. His wife had died, following a car accident, on his twenty-ninth birthday (July 22, 1933). His work at the Montreal school was going badly. In his words, it was "defeated by the rigidity of the curriculum in Quebec's protestant schools." 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 experiments 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 study instead with Karl Lashley at the University of Chicago.
In July 1934, Hebb was accepted to study under Karl Lashley at the University of Chicago. His thesis was titled "The problem of spatial orientation and place learning". Hebb, along with two other students, followed Lashley to Harvard University in September 1935. Here, he had to change his thesis. At Harvard, he did his thesis research on the effects of early visual deprivation upon size and brightness perception in a rat. That is, he raised rats in the dark and some in the light and compared their brains. In 1936, he received his PhD from Harvard.[8] The following year he worked as a research assistant to Lashley and as a teaching assistant in introductory psychology for Edwin G. Boring at Radcliffe College. His Harvard thesis was soon published, and he finished the thesis he started at University of Chicago.
In 1937, Hebb married his second wife, Elizabeth Nichols Donovan. 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 saw that the brain of a child could regain partial or full function when a portion of it is removed but that similar damage in an adult could be far more damaging, even catastrophic. From this, he deduced the prominent role that external stimulation played in the thought processes of adults. In fact, the lack of this stimulation, he showed, caused diminished function and sometimes hallucinations.
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. Together with N.W. Morton, he created the Adult Comprehension Test and the Picture Anomaly Test.
Putting the Picture Anomaly Test to use, he provided the first indication that the right temporal lobe was involved in visual recognition. He also showed that removal of large parts of the frontal lobe had little effect on intelligence. In fact, in one adult patient, who had a large portion of his frontal lobes removed in order to treat his epilepsy, he noted "a striking post-operative improvement in personality and intellectual capacity." From these sorts of results, he started to believe that the frontal lobes were instrumental in learning only early in life.
In 1939, he was appointed to a teaching position at Queen's University. In order to test his theory of the changing role of the frontal lobes with age, he designed a variable path maze for rats with Kenneth Williams called the Hebb-Williams maze, a method for testing animal intelligence later used in countless studies. He used the maze to test the intelligence of rats blinded at different developmental stages, showing that "there is a lasting effect of infant experience on the problem-solving ability of the adult rat." This became one of the main principles of developmental psychology, later helping those arguing the importance of the proposed Head Start programs for preschool children in economically poor neighborhoods.
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 behavior, Hebb developed emotional tests for chimpanzees. The experiments were somewhat unsuccessful, however because chimpanzees turned out to be hard to teach. During the course of the work there, Hebb wrote The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory,[3] his groundbreaking book that set forth the theory that the only way to explain behavior was in terms of brain function.
Afterward, 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.
His wife Elizabeth died in 1962. In 1966, Hebb married his third wife, Margaret Doreen Wright (née Williamson), a widow.
Hebb remained at McGill until retirement in 1972. He remained at McGill after retirement for a few years, in the Department of Psychology as an emeritus professor, conducting a seminar course required of all department graduate students.
In 1977 Hebb retired to his birthplace in Nova Scotia, where he completed his last book, Essay on Mind. He was appointed an honorary professor of psychology at his alma mater, Dalhousie, and regularly participated in colloquia there until his death at 81, in 1985.[9] He was survived by two daughters (both by his second marriage), Mary Ellen Hebb and Jane Hebb Paul.
Honors and awards[edit]
Hebb was a member of both the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) and the American Psychological Association (APA). He was elected President of the CPA in 1953 and of the APA in 1960. He won the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1961.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in March 1966.[1][10][11]
He received an honorary doctorate from 15 universities, including in 1961 from University of Chicago,[12] in 1965 from Dalhousie University[13] and in 1975 from Concordia University.[14]
The Donald O. Hebb Award, named in his honor, is awarded by the Canadian Psychological Association to distinguished Canadian psychologists. The award is presented yearly to a person who has made a significant contribution to promoting the discipline of psychology as a science by conducting research, by teaching and leadership, or as a spokesperson. The inaugural award was presented to Hebb in 1980.[15]
In 2011 he was posthumously inducted into the Halifax, Nova Scotia, Discovery Centre's Hall of Fame.[16] At a 2011 meeting of the executive council of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), Hebb was selected for inclusion in CSI's Pantheon of Skeptics, an award given to deceased fellows of CSI.[17]
His archives, including records relating to research and teaching activities, are held by the McGill University Archives, McGill University, in Montreal.[8]