Neural assemblies were first introduced by Donald Hebb as a way of representing entities in the neural activity of the cerebral cortex. The representation consists of the activation of potentially overlapping intrinsically connected groups of neurons, called assemblies. This idea together with the idea that learning is implemented by Hebbian synaptic plasticity forms the basis of the most successful neuro-psychological theory, which has been simulated, analyzed and used by many groups during the last 50 years in theoretical neuroscience and computer science. Hebb's idea of synaptic plasticity was that neurons that fire together wire together, i.e., that coincident activation of the pre- and postsynaptic neuron leads to a strengthening of the synapse.
Günther Palm