Pavlov's Long Term Influences

Pavlov's research greatly affected the psychological world, by giving psychologists the idea of "conditioning" as a way to see why people react to situations the way they do. His experiments even gave us the term "Pavlov's dog" which describes a person who reacts in a situation based purely on former experiences rather than actually analyzing the matter at hand. His ideas also influenced Tomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, and Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World. Unfortunatley, many of Pavlov's earlier studies on the inner workings on the human body were either proven slightly wrong or were not very pertinent to today's scientific discoveries. I belive Pavlovs ideas were very interesting for his time, but simply do not compare to some of the new ones of our times, which is why he is not as well known as he probably should be.

Quotes!

"Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin."
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/i/ivan_pavlov.html

"It is not accidental that all phenomena of human life are dominated by the search for daily bread - the oldest link connecting all living things, man included, with the surrounding nature."
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/i/ivan_pavlov.html

Ivan Pavlov Photo

Ivan Pavlov, 1849 -1936

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Ivan_Pavlov_%28Nobel%29.png

Pavlov Picture

Pavlov with his fellow scientists, working on his conditional reflex expirements.
http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/ViewImages?id=8CJGczI9NzldLS1WEDhzTnkrX3ogcFt8eS0%3D&userId=iT1Cezs%3D&zoomparams=

Pavlov's Short Term Influences

Pavlov's experiments were greatly approved by most educated russain people. He was able to keep experimenting through the 1900s and his ideas were even heard of in the west. He even had a published book on conditional reflexes in 1927. The Soviet Government was very impressed with Pavlov's ideas and his research was funded by them until he was much older. Even Lenin thought that Pavlov's ideas were brilliant. The general population did not know much about him, nor care very much either. He was rather private and, though he did win a Nobel Prize, he was not in the public eye much for his ideas (he did however have a strong opposition to many communist ideals, which he was quite vocal about). All in all, he was regarded as quite influential to the science and psychology world, but only within the more educated social circles of society. This is probably because Pavlov's ideas were so new and strange that the lower and middle classes did not understand them, given the fact that they were barley educated at all.

Pavlov's Major Ideas

While Pavlov focused most of his career on the sciences of digestion and and the circulatory system, (Though he did win a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his experiments, in 1904 ) Pavlov's most famous and probably most interesting idea was his discovery of what came to be known as Pavlovian Response, or Pavlovian Conditioning. Pavlov was working with dogs to test and measure thier saliva for a scientific investigation in 1890, when he realised taht the dogs would salivate before they recieved their food, and he started to investigate why this happend, calling it "psychic secretion". He ran numerous experiments in the 1900's and he discovered that reflexes in animals only happened conditionally after previous experiences that ended in the same ways.

Biography

Ivan Pavlov was born in Russia, in 1849. His father was a priest and he was sent to a religous school . But, in 1870 he decied to go to the University of St. Petersburg to study chemistry and physiology. He got an MD from the Imperial Medical Academy in 1876. He then studied under Carl Ludwig, a cardiovascular physiologist and Rudolf Heidenhain, a gastrointestinal physiologist. His first independent project was on the circulatory system, dealing cardiac physiology and blood pressure. He was married in 1881 to a pedagogical student. He then became a professor at the Imperial Medical Acadamy and worked there until 1924. He also changed his main area of resarch after digestion and blood pressure to experiments in what would later be called the conditioned reflex, which is what he is probably best known for. He died in Leningrad at 86, with a student of his by his deathbed.