Hebbosome

Professor Seth Grant introduced the word 'hebbosome' to describe the multiprotein complex that converts neural activity patterns into a memory trace.

A hebbosome is a conjunction of two words: ‘some’, meaning body, and ‘hebb,’ referring to the name of Donald Hebb, a very influential psychologist in the field of learning and memory who in 1949 in his book, 'The Organization of Behavior,' predicted the existence of some metabolic machinery that would convert patterns of neural activity into a memory trace. And the proteins that are found associated with PSD95 and the NMDA receptor, which are a body or a ‘some’ of proteins, do exactly what Hebb predicted. And as a tribute to his prediction, we have used that term.