He was immobilized by tuberculosis of the hip for more than a year, and during his illness he wrote a theoretical master's thesis, "Conditioned and Unconditioned Reflexes and Inhibition," which his university examiners rated cum laude. In this thesis he speculates about a phenomenon that later became known as the
Hebb synapse, stating that "the discharge of one neuron into another is increased by the discharge of the second neuron." Hebb further proposes that: "An excited neuron tends to decrease its discharge to inactive neurons," an idea that he apparently considered too audacious to include in the famous neurophysiological postulate that appears in his 1949 book,
The Organization of Behavior. Boris Babkin, a McGill physiologist and former student of Pavlov, read Hebb's thesis, and when Hebb was mobile again, Babkin encouraged him to embark on a conditioning experiment. This type of research soon palled, however, and after his wife was killed in a motor accident, Hebb decided to leave Montreal. He was offered an assistantship at Yale University, but Babkin recommended that he apply to study with Karl Lashley in Chicago. Hebb took his advice, a crucial step in his career, and was accepted.
Karl Lashley as Mentor and Colleague
At the University of Chicago, Hebb came under the influence of L.
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