43 Fun Facts About Ivan Pavlov

Following Pavlov's methods, the 'Little Albert' experiment taught a baby to fear which animal?

A white rat: a steel bar was struck behind Albert each time he touched it, and his fear soon spread to a rabbit, a fur coat and a Santa Claus mask.

Pavlov's laboratory produced which fluid, collected from its dogs, as a remedy for indigestion?

Gastric juice: the dogs kept producing it even though their swallowed food fell out through an opening in the throat and never reached the stomach.

In which city did Pavlov give his Nobel Prize lecture?

Stockholm: in the lecture Pavlov recalled that Alfred Nobel himself had sent his laboratory a considerable donation about ten years earlier.

In Pavlov's lab, when did a buzzer have to sound for a dog to learn that it meant food?

Just before the food: a sound played just after feeding failed to condition the dog, because a signal has to predict food rather than follow it.

What happened to Pavlov's Nobel Prize money after the Bolsheviks took power?

The state confiscated it, and in the hungry years that followed, some academicians living in his own building starved to death.

Which 1924 disaster at Pavlov's laboratory left some of his dogs with long-lasting nervous disorders?

A flood: rising water forced the dogs to swim from their kennels to the main building, and afterwards some of them lost their conditioned reflexes.

What did Pavlov call the reflex that made one dog struggle against any restraint in his experimental stand?

The freedom reflex: Pavlov overcame it by giving the dog all its food in the stand, setting one reflex against another.

A dog in Pavlov's lab broke down when it could no longer tell a circle from which figure?

An ellipse: as it was made ever rounder, the once quiet dog began struggling and howling, and it lost even its easy discriminations.

Which sitcom's prankster conditions a coworker, Pavlov-style, to expect a breath mint on cue?

The Office: in a 2007 episode, Jim spends weeks training Dwight to expect an Altoid whenever his computer makes a certain sound.

Pavlov's dogs fed at fixed intervals began drooling on schedule even when a meal was skipped; what was their signal?

The passing of time: the drool arrived at about the usual moment, suggesting that animals carry an inner clock that can act as a signal.

Which scientist wrote Reflexes of the Brain, the book Pavlov read as a seminarian?

Ivan Sechenov's book claimed that all mental activity is reflex; Pavlov later turned that 'bold attempt', as he called it, into experiments.

Pavlov's 'What is it?' reflex, set off by any slight change around an animal, is now called what?

The orienting response: Pavlov noted that it fades when the same new sound keeps recurring, a waning later studied as habituation.

Pavlov's prize-winning student research project studied the nerves of which organ?

The pancreas: by then the dazzling animal surgery of his teacher Elias von Cyon had drawn Pavlov into physiology.

Pavlov graduated from the Medical Military Academy in 1879 with what distinction?

He then won a competitive fellowship for postgraduate work at the same academy.

Which Bolshevik signed a 1921 decree promising Pavlov better research conditions and extra food rations?

Vladimir Lenin praised Pavlov's work as vital to the working people of the world, though Pavlov never hid his contempt for Communism.

Pavlov credited which 17th-century French philosopher with first imagining the idea of the reflex?

René Descartes pictured animals as machines, each action a necessary reaction to something outside them, an idea Pavlov took into the laboratory.

Pavlov improved Rudolf Heidenhain's small, separated section of a dog's stomach, now known as the Pavlov what?

Pouch: Pavlov's version kept its nerve supply, so the small sac responded to eating even though no food ever entered it.

Soon after it opened in 1890, which St. Petersburg institution invited Pavlov to organise its physiology department?

Institute of Experimental Medicine: there, in the 1890s, Pavlov did most of the digestion research that later won him the Nobel Prize.

The institute where Pavlov led physiology for 45 years grew from a station treating which disease by Pasteur's method?

Rabies: Prince Alexander of Oldenburg paid for the station out of his own pocket, and later funded the whole institute.

What did Pavlov call his experiments on dogs that had recovered from surgery before being studied?

Chronic experiments let one dog be studied for months or years, where the older 'acute' vivisection killed the animal on the table.

After the revolution, H. G. Wells found Pavlov's study piled with which crops Pavlov grew in his spare time?

Potatoes and carrots: food was so short that he fed his family from a vegetable plot he kept beside his laboratory.

Pavlov said he would regret giving even which lab animal to the Bolsheviks' social experiment?

A frog: if Bolshevism was an experiment, he said, it wasn't worth one, yet he never emigrated and worked under the regime until his death.

To which Soviet leader did Pavlov write in 1927 saying he was ashamed to be a Russian?

He was protesting the treatment of Russian intellectuals; remarkably, he kept his laboratory and his freedom.

In 1934, Pavlov sent letters of protest to which Soviet official?

Vyacheslav Molotov received them, yet the state kept supplying Pavlov's laboratory generously in spite of his attacks.

As he lay dying, Pavlov asked a student sitting by his bed to do what?

He wanted to leave unique evidence of the subjective experience of the terminal phase of life.

Pavlov's typology of nervous systems updated the four temperaments of which two ancient physicians?

Hippocrates and Galen's types helped him explain why his dogs reacted so differently to the same conditioning, so he sorted them into nervous types.

Pavlov's term for the body shutting down under overwhelming stress or pain was what?

Transmarginal inhibition later helped psychiatrist William Sargant explain the breakdowns of shell-shocked soldiers and, in his view, brainwashing.

Which childbirth method grew from Soviet techniques built on Pavlov's conditioned reflexes?

The Lamaze method: French obstetrician Fernand Lamaze saw the technique in the Soviet Union in 1951 and made it popular back in France.

In game theory, what does the strategy named 'Pavlov' do after a round goes badly?

Switches to the other move: this win-stay, lose-shift rule outperformed tit-for-tat in 1993 simulations because it can correct occasional mistakes.

What did Pavlov first call the drooling his dogs did at the mere sight of food?

Psychic secretion: rather than say a dog drooled because it wanted meat, Pavlov chose to study the flow objectively, as a physiologist.

In 1903, Pavlov first presented his conditioning findings at an international medical congress in which Spanish city?

Madrid: his paper there was titled The Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology of Animals, though Pavlov doubted psychology was even a science.

Which 1932 dystopian novel makes Pavlovian conditioning a major theme?

Brave New World shows babies deafened by sirens and given electric shocks whenever they crawl toward books and roses, so they grow up hating both.

Which 1973 Thomas Pynchon novel features Pavlovian conditioning as a major theme?

Gravity's Rainbow's Pavlovian psychologist, Pointsman, suspects the hero's romantic encounters predict where V-2 rockets will fall on London.

In 1994, A. Charles Catania cast doubt on whether Pavlov ever actually used which stimulus?

A bell: Pavlov often used metronomes, but a 1994 reply in that debate cited his own 1906 remark on the 'violent ringing of a bell'.

Which Royal Society honour did Pavlov receive in 1915?

He had been elected a Foreign Member of the Society eight years earlier.

A crater named after Pavlov is found on which body?

The Moon: back on Earth, his world fame may have helped shield him from persecution, though he openly denounced the Soviet government.

Which British philosopher gave Pavlov a section of his own in the book The Scientific Outlook?

Bertrand Russell praised the exactness of Pavlov's methods, yet doubted they could explain the whole of human behaviour.

In technical terms, the food in Pavlov's experiments was the what?

Unconditioned stimulus: Pavlov also used acid in the mouth, and a signal paired with it came to set off the same defensive head-shaking.

When a conditioned stimulus is repeatedly presented without food and the response fades, this is called what?

Extinction: yet pairing the signal with food again often brings the response back quickly.

When a conditioned response that faded away returns after a rest period, what is it called?

Spontaneous recovery, first described by Pavlov, shows that the fading hid the learned response rather than erasing it.

Pavlov's work became known in the West largely through which two American behaviourists?

John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner built on his work, and Watson later took behaviourism into advertising at the J. Walter Thompson agency.

Pavlov's principles underpin which behaviour-therapy technique for reducing phobias?

Systematic desensitisation, developed by Joseph Wolpe, rests on the idea that no one can be relaxed and anxious at once, so fears are faced in small steps.

Asked by E. M. Kreps whether he was religious, how did the seminary-trained Pavlov answer?

An atheist: his protests against the Soviet persecution of religion had fed a mistaken rumour that he was a believer.