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Psychology

Hayek's first academic essay was a psychological work titled 'Contributions to the Theory of the Development of Consciousness' (Beiträge zur Theorie der Entwicklung des Bewußtseins) In The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (1952), Hayek independently developed a " Hebbian learning " model of learning and memory—an idea he first conceived in 1920 prior to his study of economics. Hayek's expansion of the "Hebbian synapse" construction into a global brain theory received attention in neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, and evolutionary psychology by scientists such as Gerald Edelman, Vittorio Guidano and Joaquin Fuster.

The Sensory Order can be viewed as a development of his attack on scientism. Hayek posited two orders, namely the sensory order that we experience and the natural order that natural science revealed. Hayek thought that the sensory order actually is a product of the brain. He described the brain as a very complex yet self-ordering hierarchical classification system, a huge network of connections. Because of the nature of the classifier system, richness of our sensory experience can exist. Hayek's description posed problems to behaviorism, whose proponents took the sensory order as fundamental.