Behaviorism - Pavlov - The most badass mother f*ucker veterinarin in the history

Behaviorism - Pavlov - The most badass mother f*ucker veterinarin in the history - Pavlov was a Russian experimental neurologist and physiologist known for his discovery of classical conditioning through his experiments with dogs.

Education and Early Life

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the first of ten children, was born in Ryazan, Russian Empire. His father, Peter Dimitrievich Pavlov, was a village Russian Orthodox priest, and his mother was Varvara Ranova.

As a child, Pavlov willingly participated in household duties such as doing the dishes and taking care of his siblings. He loved to garden, ride his bicycle, row, swim, and play hockey. He devoted his summer vacations to these activities.

Although able to read by the age of seven, Pavlov did not begin formal schooling until he was eleven years old due to serious injuries he had sustained when falling from a high wall onto the stone pavement.

From his childhood days, Pavlov demonstrated intellectual curiosity along with an unusual energy, which he referred to as the instinct for research. Inspired by the progressive ideas which Dmitri Pisarev, a Russian literary critic of the 1860s, and Ivan Sechenov, the father of Russian physiology, were spreading, Pavlov abandoned his religious career and devoted his life to science.

In 1871, he enrolled in the Physics and Mathematics department at the University of St. Petersburg to study natural science.

Pavlov attended the Ryazan Church School before entering the local Theological Seminary in 1870. However, he left the seminary without graduating to attend the University of St. Petersburg. There he enrolled in the Physics and Mathematics department and took natural science courses.

In his fourth year, his first research project on the physiology of the nerves of the pancreas won him a prestigious university award.

In 1875, Pavlov completed his course with an outstanding record and received the degree of candidate of natural sciences.

Impaled by his overwhelming interest in physiology, Pavlov decided to continue his studies and proceeded to the Imperial Academy of Medical Surgery.

While at the academy, Pavlov became an assistant to his former teacher Elias von Cyon. He left the department when Cyon was replaced by another instructor.

After some time, Pavlov obtained a position as a laboratory assistant to Konstantin Nikolayevich Ovchinnikov at the physiological department of the veterinary institute. For two years, Pavlov investigated the circulatory system for his medical dissertation.

After completing his doctorate, Pavlov went to Germany where he studied in Leipzig with Carl Ludwig and in the Heyn Laboratories in Breslau. He remained there from 1884 to 1886.

Heyn was studying digestion in dogs using an exteriorized section of the stomach. However, Pavlov perfected the technique by overcoming the problem of maintaining the external nerve supply. The exteriorized section became known as the Heyn-Pavlov pouch.

In 1886, Pavlov returned to Russia to look for a new position. His application for the chair of physiology at the University of St. Petersburg was rejected.

Eventually, Pavlov was offered the chair of pharmacology at Tomsk University in Siberia and at the University of Warsaw in Poland, but he did not take up either post.

In 1890, he was appointed professor of pharmacology at the Military Medical Academy and occupied the position for five years.

In 1891, Pavlov was invited to the Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg to organize and direct the department of physiology.

Over a 45-year period under his direction, the institute became one of the most important centers of physiological research in the world.

Pavlov continued to direct the department of physiology at the institute while taking up the chair of physiology at the Medical Military Academy.

In 1895, Pavlov would head the physiology department at the academy continuously for three decades.

Starting in 1901, Pavlov was nominated over four successive years for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He did not win the prize until 1904 because his previous nominations were not specific to any discovery but based on a variety of laboratory findings.

When Pavlov received the Nobel Prize, it was specified that he did so in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion, through which knowledge on vital aspects of the subject has been transformed and enlarged.

It was at the Institute of Experimental Medicine that Pavlov carried out his classical experiments on the digestive glands which would eventually grant him the aforementioned Nobel Prize.

Pavlov investigated the gastric function of dogs and later from homeless 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.

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.

Experiments on orphan children involving drilling a hole in their cheeks and applying electric shocks were continued by his assistant Nikolai Korsakov.

In 1890, Pavlov's laboratory housed a full-scale kennel for the experimental canines.

Pavlov was interested in observing their long-term physiological processes. This required keeping them alive and healthy to conduct chronic experiments, as he called them. These were experiments over time designed to understand the normal functions of dogs.

This was a new kind of study because previously experiments had been acute, meaning that the dog went through vivisection which ultimately killed the canine in the process.

A 1921 article by Sergius Morgulis in the journal Science was critical of Pavlov's work, raising concerns about the environment in which these experiments had been performed.

Based on a report from H.G. Wells claiming that Pavlov grew potatoes and carrots in his laboratory, the article stated: "It is gratifying to be assured that Professor Pavlov is raising potatoes only as a pastime and still gives the best of his genius to scientific investigation."

That same year, Pavlov began holding laboratory meetings known as the Wednesday meetings, at which he spoke frankly on many topics including his views on psychology. These meetings lasted until he died in 1936.

Pavlov was highly regarded by the Soviet government and was able to continue his research until he reached a considerable age. He was praised by Lenin.

Despite praise from the Soviet Union government, the money that poured in to support his laboratory, and the honors he was given, Pavlov made no attempts to conceal the disapproval and contempt with which he regarded Soviet communism.

In 1923, he stated 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.

Four years later, he wrote to Stalin protesting what was being done to Russian intellectuals and saying he was ashamed to be a Russian.

After the murder of Sergey Kirov in 1934, Pavlov wrote several letters to Molotov criticizing the mass persecutions which followed and asking for the reconsideration of cases pertaining to people he knew personally.

Conscious until his final moment, Pavlov asked one of his students to sit beside his bed and record the circumstances of his dying. He wanted to create unique evidence of subjective experiences of this terminal phase of life.

Pavlov died of double pneumonia at the age of 86. He was given a grand funeral, and his study and laboratory were preserved as a museum in his honor.

His grave is in the Literatorsky section of the Volkov cemetery in St. Petersburg.

Pavlov contributed to many areas of physiology and neurological sciences. Most of his work involved research in temperament, conditioning, and involuntary reflex actions.

Pavlov performed and directed experiments on digestion, eventually publishing the work of the digestive glands in 1897 after twelve years of research.

His experiments earned him the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.

These experiments included surgically extracting portions of the digestive system from non-human animals, severing nerve bundles to determine the effects, and implanting fistulas between digestive organs and an external pouch to examine the organ's contents.

This research served as a base for broad research on the digestive system.

Further work on reflex actions involved involuntary reactions to stress and pain.

Behaviorism is still widely used today, albeit very different from early behaviorism.

Unlike functionalism and structuralism, behaviorism did not look at the mind. Behaviorism only studies observable, measurable behavior.

One of the first experiments that studied the behavior of animals was performed by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov in the early 1900s.