Donald Hebb: The Organization of Behavior

Abstract

I consider this a great privilege to be able to briefly remark on D.O. Hebb’s marvellous book “Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory” which he wrote in 1949. Hebb’s ideas have had a profound influence on brain theory, in particular his famous “A Neurophysiological Postulate” governing the correlated pre-post synaptic changes which are the basis for the engram or memory trace. Although, there are many different forms of Hebb’s postulate, I believe that essentially all “viable” mammalian cortical models embody some version of his idea: “Let us assume then that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or “trace”) tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability. The assumption can be precisely stated as follows:

When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A ‘s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased”.