Olds attended college at a number of schools including
St. John's College, Annapolis, and the
University of Wisconsin but received his undergraduate B.A. from
Amherst College in 1947. His undergraduate years were interrupted by military service in the U.S. Army during the
Second World War as part of the
Persian Gulf Command. Following the war, Olds went on to get his Ph.D. at
Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations under Professor Richard L. Solomon. His thesis was focused on motivation and led to his subsequent interest in the biological basis of motivation.[4]
Career
Following his Ph.D., Olds went on to do postdoctoral work at
McGill University under
Donald Olding Hebb, where he made his most important discovery with Peter Milner.[5] Subsequently, Olds moved to
UCLA, where he took his first academic appointment at the Brain Research Institute.[6] In 1957 Olds was appointed associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the
University of Michigan.[7] He left Michigan in 1969 to become the Bing Professor of Behavioral Biology at the
California Institute of Technology[8] where he continued his research and led a large lab until his death in a swimming accident in August 1976. His last work was aimed at understanding the mechanisms of learning and memory.
1955 Olds, J. "'Reward' from brain stimulation in the rat." Science 122:878.
The growth and structure of motives; psychological studies in the theory of action The Free Press (1956)
1956 Olds, J. "Runway and maze behavior controlled by basomedial forebrain stimulation in the rat." Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 49:507–12.
1956 Olds, J., K. F. Killiam, and P. Bach-Y-Rita. "Self-stimulation of the brain used as a screening method for tranquilizing drugs." Science 124:265–66.
1956 Olds, J. "Pleasure center in the brain." Scientific American 195: 105–16.
1958 Olds, J. "Self-stimulation of the brain." Science 127:315–24.
1958 Olds, J., and M. E. Olds. "Positive reinforcement produced by stimulating hypothalamus with iproniazid and other compounds." Science 127:1175–76.
1965 "Operant conditioning of single unit responses". Proc. 23rd Congr. Physiological Sciences. Excerpta Med. Int. Congr. Ser. no. 87, pp. 372–80.
"The central nervous system and the reinforcement of behaviour". American Psychologist. 24 (1969) 114–32.
1969 Olds, J., and Hirano, T.: "Conditioned responses of hippocampal and other neurons." Electroencephalogr. clin. Neurophysiol. 26 159–66.
1969 Olds, J., and Best, P. J.: "Single unit patterns during anticipatory behaviour". Electroencephalogr. clin. Neurophysiol. 26 144–58.
1972 Olds, J., Disterhoft, J. F., Segal, M., Kornblith, C. L., and Hirsh, R.: "Learning centres of rat brain mapped by measuring latencies of conditioned unit responses". Journal of Neurophysiology. 35 202–19.