Ivan Pavlov

1849-1936 · Russian · Classical Conditioning

The conditioned reflex opened the way to an objective study of the highest nervous activity.

Ivan Pavlov was a physiologist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on digestion and then spent the rest of his long life turning the study of the mind into a branch of physiology. Watching his dogs salivate not only at food but at the sight of the attendant who fed them, he grasped that a reflex could be transferred to a new signal — the conditioned reflex — and made it the elementary unit of what he called the higher nervous activity, the objective substitute for everything the old psychology had called the mind.

Topics Ivan Pavlov addresses

• the conditioned reflex
• the unconditioned reflex
• the higher nervous activity
• the objective method
• reinforcement
• extinction
• spontaneous recovery
• generalization
• differentiation (discrimination)
• internal inhibition
• excitation and inhibition
• irradiation and concentration
• the cortical mosaic
• the types of the nervous system
• temperament
• experimental neurosis
• the circle-ellipse experiment
• sleep as inhibition
• the first and second signal systems
• language as signals of signals
• psychic secretion
• the physiology of digestion

Converse with Ivan Pavlov on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Ivan Pavlov's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.