Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (Russian: Иван Петрович Павлов) (September 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 was widely known for first describing the phenomenon now known as classical conditioning in his experiments with dogs.

• Perfect as is the wing of a bird, it never could raise the bird up without resting on air. Facts are the air of a scientist. Without them you never can fly. Without them your "theories" are vain efforts.
  • Bequest of Pavlov to the Academic Youth of His Country. Science, Vol. 83, Issue 2155, pg. 369 (1936)

• The Sun-Paul must consider only one thing: what is the relation of this or that external reaction of the animal to the phenomena of the external world?
  • Scientific Study of So-Called Psychical Processes in the Higher Animals (1906).

• Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object, and when the human mind will contemplate itself not from within but from without.
  • Scientific Study of So-Called Psychical Processes in the Higher Animals.

• Learn the ABC of science before you try to ascend to its summit.
  • Bequest to the Academic Youth of Soviet Russia (1936).

• Learn, compare, collect the facts!
  • Bequest to the Academic Youth of Soviet Russia.

• I was, I am and will remain the Russian, the son of the Motherland. Her life first of all I will be interested in. I will live with her interests. With her’s dignity I will strengthen mine.

• It makes not a bit of difference that Pavlov was a devout physicalist who felt that a scientific treatment of conscious experience was impossible. In time-honored scientific fashion, good data outlast the orientation of the investigators who collected them.
  • Bernard J. Baars, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (1988).

• Pavlov’s findings were confirmed in the most distressing manner, and on a very large scale, during the two World Wars. As the result of a single catastrophic experience, or of a succession of terrors less appalling but frequently repeated, soldiers develop a number of disabling psycho-physical symptoms. Temporary unconsciousness, extreme agitation, lethargy, functional blindness or paralysis, completely unrealistic responses to the challenge of events, strange reversals of life-long patterns of behaviour—all the symptoms, which Pavlov observed in his dogs, re-appeared among the victims of what in the First World War was called ‘shell shock’, in the Second, ‘battle fatigue’. Every man, like every dog, has his own individual limit of endurance. Most men reach their limit after about thirty days of more or less continuous stress under the conditions of modern combat. The more than averagely susceptible succumb in only fifteen days. The more than averagely tough can resist for forty-five or even fifty days. Strong or weak, in the long run all of them break down. All, that is to say, of those who are initially sane. For, ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
  • Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), Chapter 7: "Brainwashing", p. 88 [1]

• Classical conditioning

• Link to full text of Pavlov's lectures