Donald Olding Hebb, 22 July 1904 - 20 August 1985

Abstract

Donald Olding Hebb was born in the small coastal village of Chester Basin, near Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, Canada. He attended Dalhousie University and graduated with a B.A. in English, intending to become a writer. After teaching for several years he enrolled as a part-time graduate student in psychology at McGill University (Montreal) and received an M.A. He then moved to the University of Chicago, where he studied under Karl Lashley. He accompanied Lashley to Harvard the next year, receiving his Ph.D. a year later. After postdoctoral work at Harvard, Hebb was appointed a Fellow of the Montreal Neurological Institute for two years to study the effects of brain operations on intelligence, after which he spent three years as a lecturer and assistant professor at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Hebb was then invited to study emotion in chimpanzees, at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, by Lashley, who had just been appointed Director, and he spent the next five years there. It was during this time that Hebb wrote The organization of behavior (7), a book that was to have an enormous influence on a generation of psychologists and neuroscientists. In 1947 Hebb returned to McGill as Professor of Psychology and became the Chairman of the Department the next year. He remained at McGill until his retirement in 1974, when he returned to his birthplace. He died of heart failure during a hip operation in 1985.