Ivan Pavlov

File:Ivan Pavlov (Nobel).png

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (Russian: Иван Петрович Павлов) 9September 14 1849 – February 27 1936) was a Russian physiologist, psychologist, and physician. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for research pertaining to the digestive system. Pavlov is widely known for first describing the phenomenon of classical conditioning.

Life

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in Ryazan, Russia on September 14, 1849. His father, Petr Dmitrievich Pavlov, was one of Ryazan's most respected clergymen. For the previous six generations, the Pavlov men had served Russian Eastern Orthodox Church. Consequently, it was expected that Pavlov would become a Seminarian. In his early years, Pavlov attended the Church school and began his higher education at the Ryazan Theological Seminary, which he graduated from in 1869. After reading the writings of Russian physiologist I.M. Sechenov, "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin, and stimulated by the ideas D.I. Pisarev, Pavlov abandoned his religious career to become a man of science.

In 1870, Pavlov enrolled in the Natural Sciences program at the University of Saint Petersburg where he studied physiology and chemistry under Dimitri Mendeleyev. By 1875, he graduated from the University of Saint Petersburg and in 1876 began his studies in medicine at the Military-Medical Academy which he graduated from in 1879.

In 1881, Pavlov married Seraphima (Sara) Vasilievna Karchevskaya. Seraphima suffered from a miscarriage, their son named Wirchik died unexpectedly as a young child, and another son, Vsevolod, died in 1935. Despite these tragedies, they had three children survive, two sons and one daughter, Vladimir, Victor, and Vera.

In 1883, he recieved his received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the Imperial Medical Academy and submitted his doctoral thesis entitled "The Centrifugal Nerves of the Heart." A year later in 1884, Pavlov was appointed Lecturer in Physiology at the Military-Medical Academy. By 1891, Pavlov became the Director of the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine. From 1891 to 1900, Pavlov did the majority of his research on the physiology of digestion. In 1897, Pavlov published "Lectures on the Funtions of the Principal Digestive Glands." It was in 1889, that Pavlov surgically altered a dog's digestive system so that it would eat, but the food would not reach its stomach. He observed that even in the absence of food, the stomach excreted gastric fluids.

Then in 1904, Ivan Pavlov received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his accomplishments on the physiology of digestive glands. However, a year earlier, in 1903, Pavlov began his infamous research on the reflex reactions of animals.

By 1907, he was elected as the Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and was given an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University in 1912. Pavlov and his research thrived within the communist Soviet government, as some government officials perceived his research as possibly being invaluable for brainwashing, but Pavlov was not open to those areas of research and application.

In 1924, Pavlov resigned from his professorship at the Military-Medical Academy. In 1935, the Soviet Government built a laboratory for Pavlov. The next year, in February 1936, at the age of 86, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov died in Leningrad.

Work

Pavlov’s Dog, Pavlov Museum, 2005

In the 1890s, Pavlov investigated the gastric function of dogs by externalizing a salivary gland so he could collect, measure, and analyze the saliva produced in response to food under different conditions. He noticed that the dogs tended to salivate before the food was actually delivered to their mouths. Intrigued by this he set out to investigate this "psychic secretion", as he called it.

Soon after he began to carry out a long series of experiments wherein he manipulated various stimuli that occurred before the presentation of food. It is popularly believed that Pavlov always signaled the occurrence of food by ringing a bell. However, his writings indicate that the use of a wide variety of auditory stimuli, including whistles, metronomes, tuning forks, in addition to a range of visual stimuli were used.

He thereby established the basic laws for what he called "conditional reflexes" that became 'conditional' once a pairing of an conditioned stimulus (referred to as a CS) and and conditioned response (referred to as a CR) became evident.

Later in his life he became particularly interested in trying to modify conditioning to establish an experimental model of the induction of abnormal tendencies. His laboratory in Saint Petersburg has been carefully preserved.

Legacy

Pavlov's term "conditional reflex" ("условный рефлекс") was mistranslated from the Russian as "conditioned reflex", and other scientists reading his work concluded that since such reflexes were conditioned, they must be produced by the process of conditioning. As Pavlov's work became known in the West, particularly through the writings of John B. Watson, the idea of "conditioning" as an automatic form of learning became a key concept in the development of comparative psychology and of the foundation of the psychological approach known as behaviorism.

Pavlov's discoveries have had a deep, acute impact on both of the disciplines of psychology and medicine. Pavlov had the ability to take his findings and apply them to the external world by advising psychiatrist that their patients would be more suited in a quiet environment with few stimuli in order to decrease the likelihood of outbreaks caused by conditioned reflexes.

Pavlov's research on conditional reflexes has also greatly influenced not only science, but popular culture as well. The phrase "Pavlov's dog" is often used to describe someone who merely reacts to a situation and fails to use critical thinking. Pavlovian conditioning was also a major theme in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel, Brave New World.

Publications

• Pavlov, I. P. (1927). "Conditioned Reflexes". London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Boakes, R. A. (1984). From Darwin to behaviourism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Firkin, B. G. & Whitworth, J. A. (1987). Dictionary of Medical Eponyms. Parthenon Publishing. ISBN 1-85070-333-7
• Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Tiner, John Hudson. (2000). "100 Scientists Who Shaped World History". Bluewood Books.
• Todes, D. P. (1997). "Pavlov's Physiological Factory," Isis. Vol. 88. The History of Science Society, p. 205-246.
• Todes, Daniel.(2000). "Ivan Pavlov: Exploring the Animal Machine." Oxford University Press.

External links

• PBS article
• Nobel Prize website biography of I. P. Pavlov
• Institute of Experimental Medicine article on Pavlov
• Link to full text of Pavlov's lectures

Credits

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