Donald O. Hebb

Donald Olding Hebb (1904 to 1985) was a Canadian psychologist who helped found neuropsychology by arguing that behavior and thought can only be explained through how the brain works. Born in Chester, Nova Scotia, he studied at Dalhousie and McGill, took his doctorate at Harvard after following Karl Lashley there, and then worked with Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where he studied how brain injury and surgery change human function. His 1949 book The Organization of Behavior set out the idea now called Hebbian learning, in which connected assemblies of neurons underlie learning and thought. He became professor and then chairman of psychology at McGill, and a 2002 survey ranked him the nineteenth most cited psychologist of the twentieth century.