Fire Together, Wire Together: The Mind of Donald Hebb

In 1949, a Canadian psychologist with no patience for the strict behaviorism of his day proposed a rule for how connections between neurons change with experience — and used it to imagine how thought could emerge from cell assemblies firing in loops. That idea became "neurons that fire together, wire together," now one of neuroscience's most repeated phrases, even though Donald Hebb himself never wrote it quite that way. This episode follows Hebb from a childhood in Nova Scotia, through failed ambitions as a novelist, into a career that helped found a whole way of thinking about the mind — one whose fingerprints are now all over modern learning algorithms.