Pavlov’s dogs were happy campers
Practically everybody knows about Pavlov’s dogs.
But do many people know about their master, Pavlov himself?
The other day I started to wonder—apropos of just about nothing—why dogs? And was Pavlov mean to his dogs, or were they treated well? That curiosity led to learning something about a fascinating, laudable man—Ivan Pavlov—about whom I’d previously known next to nothing.
Take a look:
After completing his doctorate, Pavlov went to Germany where he studied in Leipzig with Carl Ludwig in the Heidenhain laboratories in Breslau. He remained there from 1884 to 1886. Heidenhain was studying digestion in dogs, using an exteriorized section of the stomach.
So it started with studying digestion, with dogs as the subject.
In 1891, Pavlov was invited to the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg to organize and direct the Department of Physiology. Over a 45-year period, under his direction it became one of the most important centers of physiological research…
In 1904, Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize “in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion, through which knowledge on vital aspects of the subject has been transformed and enlarged”.
While at the Institute of Experimental Medicine he carried out his classical experiments on the digestive glands which is how he eventually won the Nobel prize mentioned above. Pavlov investigated the gastric function of dogs, and later, children, by externalizing a salivary gland so he could collect, measure, and analyze the saliva and what response it had to food under different conditions.
And then he noticed something surprising, and decided to look into it:
He noticed that the dogs tended to salivate before food was actually delivered to their mouths, and set out to investigate this “psychic secretion”, as he called it.
This is how he treated his dogs:
Pavlov’s laboratory housed a full-scale kennel for the experimental animals. Pavlov was interested in observing their long-term physiological processes. This required keeping them alive and healthy in order to conduct chronic experiments, as he called them. These were experiments over time, designed to understand the normal functions of animals. This was a new kind of study, because previously experiments had been “acute,” meaning that the dog went through vivisection and was ultimately killed in the process.
But perhaps best of all is how he later dealt with the Soviets:
Pavlov was highly regarded by the Soviet government, and he was able to continue his research until he reached a considerable age. He was praised by Lenin. However, despite the praise from the Soviet Union government, the money that poured out to support his laboratory, and the honours he was given, Pavlov made no attempts to conceal the disapproval and contempt in which he held Soviet Communism. For example, in 1923 he claimed that he would not sacrifice even the hind leg of a frog to the type of social experiment that the regime was conducting in Russia. Also, in 1927, he wrote to Stalin protesting at what was being done to Russian intellectuals and saying he was ashamed to be a Russian. After the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, Pavlov wrote several letters to Molotov criticizing the mass persecutions which followed and asking for the reconsideration of cases pertaining to several people he knew personally.
He could get away with it because of the esteem in which he was held. But it was still brave of him.
His lab is now a museum.
[NOTE: In case you’re not familiar with Pavlov’s major work with dogs and salivation, here’s an explanation:
The concept for which Pavlov is famous is the “conditioned reflex” (or in his own words the conditional reflex) he developed jointly with his assistant Ivan Filippovitch Tolochinov in 1901. He had come to learn this concept of conditioned reflex when examining the rates of salivations among dogs. Pavlov had learned that when a buzzer or metronome was sounded in subsequent time with food being presented to the dog in consecutive sequences, the dog would initially salivate when the food was presented. The dog would later come to associate the sound with the presentation of the food and salivate upon the presentation of that stimulus…
It is popularly believed that Pavlov always signaled the occurrence of food by ringing a bell. However, his writings record the use of a wide variety of stimuli, including electric shocks, whistles, metronomes, tuning forks, and a range of visual stimuli, in addition to the ring of a bell.]
The soviets rarely did anything to those studio l who had some fame
If one read the books of the changers of the period. Prior like utkey, you would find that this was often true and she talks about it as it did not allow her to save her love Arcady… Who was not as famous as she was having come from the West, to the east, and losing her faith in the system after discovering the truths
My dog salivates when I prepare his food. As he is a very large and “jowly” dog, this is a fairly wet affair, and traces of his foreknowledge that food will be forthcoming invariably end up on the floor and walls. Damn you, Pavlov!
F:
Mastiff?
Pavlov investigated the gastric function of dogs, and later, children, by externalizing a salivary gland so he could collect, measure, and analyze the saliva and what response it had to food under different conditions.
Egads. “Externalizing a salivary gland” sounds pretty bad to do to dogs, and he did it to children?
OM: No, a rescue dog, so we’re not sure, but certainly not a mastiff. We guess St. Bernard and chocolate Lab mix.
F:
Sounds like a good temperament, 150 lbs?
The Russians have a reputation for being the best at controlling the mind via psychology and conditioning. Even the US military has picked up some of the later day operant conditioning, now used to train people to pull the trigger (kill on demand) without hesitation in battle.
Used to be about 50% of American soldiers in WWII refused to pull the trigger. They weren’t useless or cowards, they just preferred to reload guns for the people who could actually shoot people and hit them. Helped avoid PTSD too. PTSD was NOT being shell shocked from having a huge concussive explosion happen near your head. That was, I think, the original interpretation of PTSD though.
People can see some modern derivations of this conditioning via North Korea and China’s “mass person marches” on video.
And of course, for a more homegrown American solution, just look at how Democrats in this country obey orders to persecute Christians and expose children to the Gaystapo tactics.
I was a psych major in undergrad and conducted my own experiment on weekends with a good friend.
I had a very small bell on a necklace. We would go to the men’s dorms/floors and approach certain rooms and I would let the bell quietly ring and then we would be friendly, let’s go for drinks and dance and be happy. It did not take that long before I could let the bell ring at the end of the hallway and the guys would be in the hallway ready to go out partying.
Ah, the good old days….
Ann – re studying gastric function – check the history of William Beaumont.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beaumont
Exteriorize: to expose (an internal structure) temporarily outside the body, for observation, surgery, or experimentation.
OM:
Very good temperament, but his size intimidates mightily. We try to keep his weight right around 110, but if it were left to him he’d be 150 lbs. We estimate his age (actually the vet did so) at around 8 years now and he is failing. Eyes and ears about gone, had to have a rear leg amputated last year because of cancer. My daughter picked him up when she was working rescue and no one would take him, and she left him with us when she went overseas several years ago.
The bigger the dog, the sooner the end.
As to “exteriorizing” the salivary gland, that simply meant surgically relocating the opening of Stenson’s duct from inside the cheek to the outside, since plastic cannulas did not then exist.
Stenson’s duct was found by Niels Stenson in the early 1600s. All good docs were anatomists in those days.
I enjoy reading non-anatomists’ notions. Exteriorizing the parotid gland is anatomically absurd, since that ignores blood supply issues.
That sure didn’t read like Pavlov’s dogs were happy campers. I sure wouldn’t want my saliva glands or stomach exteriorized.
liz wrote, “It did not take that long before I could let the bell ring at the end of the hallway and the guys would be in the hallway ready to go out partying.”
That’s not the same as salivation, because the men’s reaction is under (some :D) conscious control. If, however, you could show that in a classroom (or some other unrelated) the bell alone caused men to react in an unconscious, involuntary, physiological way, such as salivating or some other sign of arousal…
Thanks for an enlightening article.
The poor man, going from the 1880’s when science was advancing fast to the “science” of the Soviet.
May he rest in peace, may we see farther as we stand on the shoulders of those great scientists of the past.
Let truth and wisdom lead us. Please, God, this more than anything.
On a related note, there’s a shock band for people who want to quit a bad habit. http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/05/23/device-uses-electric-shock-to-zap-users-out-of-bad-habits/