Pavlov was researching the physiology of digestion in dogs and discovered

phenomena related to learning, eventually founding the science of classical

conditioning. His contributions to science and the psychology of behaviorism -
pairing buzzers with food and making dogs salivate to the buzzers alone - and
his 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine are oft-repeated.

. Pavlov's laboratories were famous and highly attractive placements for

students in medicine and physiology, and with state-offered incentives, he
had many mentees and collaborators eager to work with him.

Pavlov even credited "We, the laboratory" for discoveries, making his lab
sound like a collective

"Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?" (Coon & Mitterer, 2014).

"conditioned reflex"

"what's that?" reflex, as well as other dimensions of his work not widely
known outside of Russia such as the phases of sleep, the freedom instinct,
and reflexive will

rigorously experimental psychology

found them to be better than many men (Todes, 2014). Pavlov eventually
implemented a yearly quota of female admissions, likely starting the earliest
affirmative action for women scientists in the history of psychology. In this
sense, Pavlov's support of Russian women in science is consistent with early
Russian feminism, seeking the goal of eliminating barriers to women's
education. This is remarkable considering women were largely banned from
other scientific labs across Russia, as well as the United States, and most
had to go to Europe to be trained in lab research.

Pavlov's lab was the only experimental lab in the history of psychology to
have had its own air defense squadron, defending the Institute from air raids
during World War II. Even more astonishing, out of a crew of 866 staff and
research scientists, 394 (or 46%) were women.

Pavlov's reputation drew women from all over Europe and the Russian Empire

Shumova-Simanovskaya worked on a variety of topics unrelated to

psychology: chemical distributions in, and effects on, the body, Grave's
disease, the synthesis of salicylic acid and a "grainy pepsin." It was her
surgical expertise that devised the esophagotomy surgery to measure saliva
which led to Pavlov's Nobel Prize.
Androcentrism and the Great Man Narrative in
Psychology Textbooks: The Case of Ivan Pavlov
Hill, Darryl B.Journal of Research in Gender Studies; New
York Vol. 9, Iss. 1, (2019): 9-37. DOI:10.22381/JRGS9120191

Pavlov had used his study of dogs and conditional reflexes to create an
elaborate theory of brain physiology in which he postulated that at a
physiological level all ‘higher nervous activity’ could be understood as an
interaction between two fundamental processes, ‘excitation’ and ‘inhibition’.
He used these terms in his own idiosyncratic way. They did not describe the
action of neurons or synapses; rather, Pavlov believed he was mapping the
regularities of a higher order of whole-brain activity.

In practice this meant research studies that attempted to find patterns in

the conditional reflexes of patients suffering from various psychoses, and in
studies of sleep therapy. Sleep therapy was the Pavlovian treatment par
excellence. In the 1920s, Pavlov had hypothesised that sleep induced a state
of ‘protective inhibition’ in which the brain protected and repaired the cells in
the cerebral cortex. He speculated that prolonged sleep therapy enabled
protective inhibition to cure serious mental illness like schizophrenia, which
he believed was caused by a ‘chronic hypnotic state that resulted when a
cortex weakened either by heredity or experience was subjected to an
“overwhelming excitation”’

‘suppressing broad democracy’ – not relevant

The implication was that there might be physiological mechanisms that

were more fundamental to brain function than Pavlov’s ‘excitation’ and
‘inhibition’. – is this important? One author, Nikolai Timofeev, claimed that
dogmatic Pavlovians had actually harmed Pavlov’s own legacy by preventing
research on psychopharmacology, something that ‘could not help but cause
sorrow’. ‘Within our specialty,’ Timofeev wrote, ‘the desire of I.P. Pavlov to
expand pharmacology in the direction of therapy as experimental science
75
remained unrealised.’ It was now psychoactive drugs, not conditional
reflexes, which were being touted as the key to creating a rational scientific
foundation for modern psychiatry.
The Psychopharmacological Revolution in the
USSR: Schizophrenia Treatment and the Thaw in
Soviet Psychiatry, 1954–64
Zajicek, Benjamin.Medical History; London Vol. 63, Iss. 3, (Jul 2019): 249-
269. DOI:10.1017/mdh.2019.26

Lamarckism by Other Means: Interpreting Pavlov’s

Conditioned Reflexes in Twentieth-Century Britain
Hill-Andrews, Oliver.Journal of the History of Biology;
Dordrecht Vol. 52, Iss. 1, (Mar 2019): 3-43. DOI:10.1007/s10739-018-9540-
0

They saw, in the followers of National Socialism, how Pavlovian conditioning could create a national
movement, and believed that this could be used for their own more democratic form of socialism. In
the final part of the essay, I suggest that this broad socio-cultural movement to reshape humanity
proved controversial, especially in the post-war period and in light of Soviet use of brainwashing.
The likes of Aldous Huxley and F. A. Hayek feared that conditioning could only lead to
totalitarianism, while the historian E. P. Thompson put forward a socialist humanism that left room
for human agency.

Shaw, meanwhile, subscribed to a Lamarckian view, whereby organisms consciously adapted and
changed in response to their environments

he provided experimental proof of the power of the environment to effect rapid and profound
change in human nature. This interpretation of Pavlov’s work was promoted in particular by a
number of left-wing scientific intellectuals, who believed that science and society would improve
under a socialist system, and it formed the basis for a broad socio-cultural movement which aimed
to refashion people into socialists by conditioning their reflexes.
the potential of Pavlovian conditioning reached its height in the 1930s, before declining during the
Cold War, when it became associated with totalitarianism.

August Weismann’s claims, based on experiments on mice, that somatic changes could not impact
heredity (because the germ-plasm was unaffected by changes to the body or behavior) was a major
blow to Lamarckians. Weismann suggested that changing one’s lifestyle would not have a
permanent impact on future generations: in Hale’s words, ‘‘it seemed that the vista of what might
be possible in the future was clearly much narrower than they had previously believed’’ – relevant!

I suggest that the notion of conditioning reflexes had a greater impact among the non-specialist
public, particularly among socialists, than has previously been recognized described conditioned
reflexes as ‘‘the jargon of today’’

attempts to make new people through Pavlovian conditioning were most conspicuous in totalitarian
countries, especially in Nazism’s creation of a Volksgemeinschaft; Crowther and others
recognized that this success could be replicated for a more democratic form of socialism.
‘‘engineer human souls’’ (in Stalin’s blood-curdling phrase)

psychoanalysis … Not only was it too subjective and incapable of being experimentally verified (in
contrast to Pavlov’s work), its supporters also aimed, in the words of the socialist biochemist Joseph
Needham, ‘‘at reconciling their patients to the existing order, i.e. of fitting them for their
environment; … they do not consider the possibility that this environment is itself sick’’ (Needham,
1943, p. 172).11 Psychoanalysis, in other words, approached amelioration from the wrong direction:
to cure the person, one had to cure the environment.

conditioned reflexes offered a solution for those socialists who appreciated the implications of
Weismann and Mendel, but did not want to abandon the effect of the environment or a belief in
human plasticity as a means to effect social and political as well as biological change.

Pavlov suggested that humanity was not doomed to be selfish and competitive, the aim to ‘‘make
socialists’’ could once again gain legitimacy. If utopian aspirations had been constricted by
developments in evolutionary biology, they would soon widen again under the influence of Pavlov
recognized to be of extreme importance by physiologists.

Pavl page 15

Sniffer dogs as a screening/diagnostic tool for

COVID-19: a proof of concept study
Eskandari, Esmaeil; Milad Ahmadi Marzaleh; Roudgari, Hassan; Ramin
Hamidi Farahani; Nezami-Asl, Amir; et al.BMC Infectious Diseases;
London Vol. 21, (2021): 1-8. DOI:10.1186/s12879-021-05939-6

(MINE - indirectly) As was prevalent at the time, women were making the impact and contributions
to society and economy. Pavlov appreciated women colleagues considerably and made it a point to
employ a quota of women, which at a time constituted up to 46% of all personnel at Pavlov’s
Institute of Physiology (Hill, 2019). This news spread wide which evidently attracted European
women to the science professions.