Ivan Pavlov – The Dog, the Bell, and the Reflex

From saliva to behaviorism — the roots of conditioning.

Pavlov did not come to psychology by intention. He came from the hard school of physiology, a discipline that prized measurable processes and unromantic claims. He trained hands to do delicate surgery on small nerves and glands, and he built apparatus that could give the body a chance to tell the truth without theatrics. Digestion, to him, was a symphony of secretions and muscular waves; he wrote a great treatise on it and won the highest prize his profession could bestow. In 1904 the Nobel committee called his name for discoveries about the physiology of digestion, a recognition earned not by a single clever experiment but by a decade of exacting work. The irony is that this triumph provided the platform for a second life’s work that would travel further than he could have guessed, into classrooms, clinics, advertising offices, and the quiet corners of ordinary fear.

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