Donal Olding Hebb: The Father Of Neururopsychology

Donal Olding Hebb was a perhaps the most influential psychologist of this century. He paved the way for the participation of behavioural scientists in the ever expanding field of neuroscience. This essay will explore Hebb’s life and how he has become known as the father of neuropsychology.
In 1904 Donald Olding Hebb was born in Chester, Nova Scotia. He was the eldest of four children whose parents were both physicians. Hebb’s mother was influenced by the theories of Maria Montessori and home schooled him till the age of eight. He sailed through elementary school; graduating at the age of twelve (). Hebb then set his heart on becoming a novelist by gaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy in 1925, from Dalhousie University.
He assisted Penfield in the assessment of exploring the effects of brain injury and surgery on the frontal lobe lesions including the effects on human intelligence and behaviour. He observed that by removing large amounts of tissue it left little effect on memory and intelligence, concluding that most of the neural substrate for learning and memory must be widely distributed in the brain rather than in a specific location. Hebb then went on to serve as a professor at Queens University in Kingston for three years where he developed the Hebb-Williams maze designed to test human and animal
The following year, in 1949, his book ‘The Organisation of Behaviour: A Neuropsychological Theory’ was published and was received with great enthusiasm. This was considered one of his greatest accomplishments and has been described along with Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ as the two most important books in Biology. (Adams 1998). The growing movement during this period was to reject cognitive constructs linking physiological bases of behaviour but Hebb’s book marked a turning point as he explained ‘the problem of understanding behaviour is the problem of understanding the total action of the nervous system and vice versa’ (1949. P. xiv). His theory laid the groundwork to find a solution to this problem by presenting three key postulates known as: Hebbian learning theory, cell assembly and phase