In his seminal 1949 book, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory, the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb argued that if two nearby neurons were frequently active (“firing”) at the same time, their synaptic coupling would strengthen so that they learned to help trigger each other—an idea captured by the popular slogan “Fire together, wire together.” Although the details of how actual brains learn are still far from understood, and research has shown that the answers are in many cases much more complicated, it’s also been shown that even this simple learning rule (known as
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