Donald'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.
In 1928, he became a graduate student at McGill University. But, at the same time, he was appointed headmaster of a troubled school in the suburbs of Montreal. 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.
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. 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 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, his groundbreaking book that set forth the theory that the only way to explain behavior was in terms of brain function.
In 1975, he received an honorary doctorate from Concordia University.
His archives, including records relating to research and teaching activities, are held by the McGill University Archives, McGill University, in Montreal.
The Organization of Behavior is considered Hebb's most significant contribution to the field of neuroscience. 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, it connected the biological function of the brain as an organ together with the higher function of the mind.
Not only did Hebb's model for the working of the mind influence how psychologists understood the processing of stimuli within the mind but also it opened up the way for the creation of computational machines that mimicked the biological processes of a living nervous system. Hebb argued that simple underlying neural mechanisms could explain observed psychological phenomena such as learning. Computer simulations of neural networks were done starting in the mid-1950s, but the networks were too small to have any chance to exhibit behavior that could reasonably be identified with thinking. While the dominant form of synaptic transmission in the nervous system was later found to be chemical, modern artificial neural networks are still based on the transmission of signals via electrical impulses that Hebbian theory was first designed around.
Hebb viewed motivation and learning as related properties. He believed that everything in the brain was interrelated and worked together. His theory was that everything we experience in our environment fires a set of neurons called a cell assembly. This cell assembly is the brain's thoughts or ideas. These cell assemblies then work together to form phase sequences, which are streams of thoughts. Once these cell assemblies and phase sequences are formed, they can be activated by stimulation from the environment. Therefore, the more stimulating and rich the environment, the more the cell assemblies grow and learn. This theory played into his beliefs in education. Hebb believed that the environment was very important to learning in children. Children learn by building up these cell assemblies and phase sequences. An enriched environment with varied opportunities for sensory and motor experiences contribute to children developing the cell assemblies and phase sequences necessary for continued learning in adulthood. To attempt to prove this, Hebb and his daughters raised pet rats at home. By raising them in an enriched environment, the rats showed improved maze learning in adulthood. This research into environmental enrichment contributed to the development of the Head Start Program used today.
Recent research has argued that Hebb's sensory deprivation research was funded by and coordinated with the CIA (McCoy, 2007). Some of this research was done in secret, and the results were initially shared only with United States authorities. Some of this research involved volunteers who spent hours in sensory deprivation conditions that some argue should be considered torture, although the subjects in his studies were university student volunteers, not patients, and were free to quit the experiment at any time. Similar procedures, involving isolation tanks filled with heavily salted, neutrally buoyant water kept at body temperature, also served as the basis for techniques developed to enhance relaxation and meditation, which are still in use.
At a meeting of the executive council of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) in Denver, Colorado in April 2011, Hebb was selected for inclusion in CSI's Pantheon of Skeptics. The Pantheon of Skeptics was created by CSI to remember the legacy of deceased fellows of CSI and their contributions to the cause of scientific skepticism.
^ a b c Milner, P. M.; Milner, B. (1996). "Donald Olding Hebb. 22 July 1904-20 August 1985". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 42: 192–204. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1996.0012.
^ a b c d Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. New York: Wiley and Sons. ISBN 9780471367277.
^ Jean-Pierre Didier, Emmanuel Bigand. Rethinking Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine: New Technologies Induce New Learning Strategies. Springer, 2010. ISBN 978-2-8178-0033-2. He was also part of the now revealed secret agency that tested volunteered solitary confinement prisoners, Putting them through tests that can cause madness and delusion that makes humans love inanimate objects and imagining fake objects/scenarios.
^ "Theses from Notable Alumni, 1931-1960". Highlights from McGill Theses and Dissertations. McGill University Library. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
^ a b "Donald Olding Hebb Fonds, MG1045". McGill Archival Collections Catalogue. McGill University Archives. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
^ "Library and Archive Catalogue". Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2011-04-29. Retrieved 17 November 2010.
^ "Honorary Degree Citation - Donald Olding Hebb* | Concordia University Archives". archives.concordia.ca. Retrieved 2016-04-07.
^ "Canadian Psychological Association > CPA Award Descriptions and Past Recipients - www.cpa.ca". www.cpa.ca. Retrieved 2015-06-24.
^ Wolfram, Stephen (2002). A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, Inc. p. 1099. ISBN 978-1-57955-008-0.
^ Brown, R.M.; Milner, P.M. (2003). "The Legacy of Donald O. Hebb: More than the Hebb Synapse". Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 4 (12): 1013–1019. doi:10.1038/nrn1257. PMID 14682362.
^ RaeHyuck, L.; Fuhua, Z. (2014). "Head Start Participation and School Readiness: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort". Developmental Psychology. 50 (1): 202–215. doi:10.1037/a0032280. PMC 4050643. PMID 23527496.
^ Engelhardt, Tom (8 June 2009). "Pioneers of Torture". antiwar.com.
^ "Jennifer Lawrence on Her New Movie, New Relationship, and How She Stays So Damn Relatable". Vogue.
Klein, R. M. (1999). "The Hebb legacy". Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. 53: 1–3. doi:10.1037/h0087295.
"Hebb, Donald O. (1904-1985)". Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology (2 ed.). 2001.
"Donald Hebb Biography". Great Canadian Psychology Website. Retrieved 2006-03-09.
"Did he or didn't he? The Canadian accused of inventing CIA torture". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2016-01-08.
"Donald Hebb (1904 - 1985)". Harnad E-Print Archive and Psycoloquy and BBS Journal Archives. Retrieved 2006-03-18.
Alfred W. McCoy (2007). "Science in Dachau's Shadow: Hebb, Beecher, and the Development of CIA Psychological Torture and Modern Medical Ethics". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. 43 (4): 401–417. doi:10.1002/jhbs.20271. PMID 17912716.
This page was last edited on 15 February 2019, at 16:21 (UTC).