Brain, memory and development: the imprint of Gabriel Horn

This special issue of Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews is dedicated to the memory of Sir Gabriel Horn, who died on 2nd August 2012. In his impressive career that spanned more than 50 years (Bolhuis and Johnson, 2012; Brown, 2013), Horn’s contributions to cognitive neuroscience consistently pioneered new approaches and areas of investigation for others to follow, as illustrated by the papers in this special tribute issue. The contributions to this issue have been inspired particularly by Gabriel’s pioneering work on the neural mechanisms of learning and memory in imprinting. As a medical student at the University of Birmingham, Gabriel already showed great interest in brain and cognition, and during a year working with Solly Zuckerman, Professor of Anatomy, he wrote an essay on ‘The Neurological Basis of Thought’ published in a student journal called ‘The Mermaid’ (Horn, 1952). In this paper, Horn laid the foundations of much of his later work on the neural basis of attention, habituation, memory, and development. Zuckerman immediately recognised the originality of the essay, and wrote ‘Hebb’ all over it. Donald Hebb had published his seminal book ‘The Organization of Behavior’ in 1949, outlining a theory of memory and neural connectivity, which remains a bible of cognitive neuroscience to this day (Hebb, 1949). Gabriel had never heard of Hebb’s theory at the time, but had independently come up with some similar proposals in his student essay.