Donald O. Hebb

Donald Olding Hebb was a preeminent psychologist and professor at McGill University widely hailed as the father of neuropsychology. He sought to bridge the conceptual gap between neurophysiology and mental processes such as perception, memory, and learning.

In his monumental 1949 work, The Organization of Behavior, Hebb proposed that when an axon of cell A excites cell B repeatedly, metabolic changes occur so that A's efficiency in firing B is increased. This rule of synaptic plasticity, known worldwide as Hebbian learning, became a cornerstone of both biological neuroscience and modern artificial intelligence computational modeling.