In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
IP–1849–2026  ·  The Consulting Room

Ivan
Pavlov

1849  —  1936
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Pavlov
Ryazan, 1849  ·  Leningrad, 1936

The priest's son who won a Nobel Prize for digestion — then spent thirty years teaching dogs to show us how the mind is built.

He left the seminary after reading Darwin and Sechenov, and spent twenty years on the nerves that govern digestion, using dogs he kept alive and healthy for years. The work won the 1904 Nobel Prize. But the dogs drooled before the food arrived, at the sight of the bowl or the step of the attendant, and he gave the rest of his life to that: the conditioned reflex, inhibition, and neuroses made in the laboratory.

He denounced the Bolsheviks to their faces and took their money for his laboratories. Thousands of dogs passed through them.

Consultation

The crowning achievement
of the animal kingdom.

Pavlov speaks from 1,453 chunks across three works — Conditioned Reflexes, his Oxford lectures of 1927 in Anrep's translation; the Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, twenty-five years of papers and addresses translated by his American student Horsley Gantt; and The Work of the Digestive Glands, the research that won him the Nobel Prize.

His discourse holds Charles Sherrington's Integrative Action of the Nervous System, the other great reflex physiology of the age, and John B. Watson's Behaviorism, which took up his conditioned reflex in America and made it a creed.

Ask him whether he really rang a bell. Ask him whether people are conditioned reflexes too. Ask him what he makes of phone notifications. Ask him how he justifies what his dogs went through — and why he took Soviet money.

The Conditioned ReflexDigestionInhibitionExperimental NeurosisTypes of Nervous SystemObjective MethodNobel 1904
The problem of the mechanism of this complex structure which is so rich in function has got hidden away in a corner, and this unlimited field, so fertile in possibilities for research, has never been adequately explored.
Conditioned Reflexes  ·  Lecture I  ·  1927 (Anrep tr.)

Drawn From the Corpus