PERSON
Donald Hebb
The Nova Scotian psychologist who, in a single 1949 sentence about how two nerve cells might strengthen the link between them, provided the founding principle of neural learning—the conceptual ancestor of the weight-update rule at the heart of every artificial neural network ever built.
Donald Olding Hebb is the scientist who began by wanting to write novels and ended by writing the sentence on which modern artificial intelligence rests. In 1949, after seventeen years of revising, he published The Organization of Behavior and into the middle of it placed a single careful claim about synapse strengthening: when one cell repeatedly takes part in firing another, some change grows between them that makes the first cell better at firing the second. The popular paraphrase—"neurons that fire together wire together"—is a phrase he never wrote and a claim weaker than the one he made; the word "together" loses the directionality that was the sentence's intellectual substance. What he actually proposed was causal: cell A must take part in firing cell B, must contribute to it, must in some sense come first. From this one directional postulate grew a theory of how experience builds the mind through connection-strengthening, and,
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