It was a bad translation of the Russian uslovnyi, or “conditional,” reflex. Pavlov is perhaps best known for introducing the idea of the conditioned reflex, although Todes notes that he never used that term. “Indeed, the iconic bell would have proven totally useless to his real goal, which required precise control over the quality and duration of stimuli (he most frequently employed a metronome, a harmonium, a buzzer, and electric shock).” Pavlov “never trained a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell,” Todes writes. That begins with the popular image of a dog slavering at the ringing of a bell. In fact, much of what we thought we knew about Pavlov has been based on bad translations and basic misconceptions. Todes, a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
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Skinner and other behaviorists often spoke of their debt to Pavlov, particularly to his view that free will was an illusion, and that the study of human behavior could be reduced to the analysis of observable, quantifiable events and actions.īut Pavlov never held such views, according to “Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science” (Oxford), an exhaustive new biography by Daniel P. Two years after reading the Times Magazine piece, he attended a lecture that Pavlov delivered at Harvard and obtained a signed picture, which adorned his office wall for the rest of his life. Pavlov had formulated a basic psychological principle-one that also applied to human beings-and discovered an objective way to measure how it worked. When they drooled in response to a sight or sound that was associated with food by mere happenstance, a “conditional reflex” (to a “conditional stimulus”) had been created. Dogs naturally drooled when fed: that was, in Pavlov’s terms, an “unconditional” reflex. They didn’t need to see, let alone taste, the food in order to react physically.
Pavlov had noticed, in his research on the digestive system of dogs, that they drooled as soon as they saw the white lab coats of the people who fed them. That unexplored world was the mechanics of the human brain. Instead, Wells described Pavlov, whose systematic approach to physiology had revolutionized the study of medicine, as “a star which lights the world, shining down a vista hitherto unexplored.” The piece, which appeared in the Times Magazine, was ostensibly a review of the English translation of Pavlov’s “Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex.” But, as Wells pointed out, it was “not an easy book to read,” and he didn’t spend much time on it. Wells about the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Then, in 1927, when he was twenty-three, he read an essay by H.
He had hoped to become a novelist, and majored in English. Skinner gave little thought to psychology.
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