ABSTRACT
I deeply appreciate the opportunity to participate in this lecture series, organized in honor of Donald Hebb. Hebb's work has had an enormous and beneficial impact on psychology; he may have done more than any other single individual to bring us out of the Dark Ages. Unfortunately, advancing past the Dark Ages is not enough. History records that the Dark Ages were followed by the Middle Ages, which had problems of their own. During the Middle Ages, people continued to believe a lot of things that were not true and put their faith in an unnecessarily rigid system of thought. We are still in the Middle Ages of psychology, I think. Many false beliefs are widely accepted, including particularly the belief in a rigid and mechanical mental system whose properties need only be discovered by enterprising researchers. Thus, Hebb has left us with a great deal to do.
