Biomedical subjects

G Windholz

Publications and source records attributed to G Windholz.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

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Pavlov and the mind-body problem.

I. P. Pavlov claimed that the mind-body problem would ultimately be resolved by empirical methods, rather than by rational arguments. A committed monist, Pavlov was confronted by dualism in the case of an hysterical person. Under normal conditions, her body's left side was insensitive to pain, but when she was hypnotized, there was a reversal of her sensitivity to pain, with the right side becoming insensitive. Pavlov acknowledged that the divergence between stimulation and response suggested dualism, yet condemned his disciple G.P. Zelenyĭ as well as Charles S. Sherrington, for their dualistic tendencies. Pavlov's continuous adherence to monism it attributed to the influence of popular scientific books that he read during his adolescence. The books maintained that science was based upon monism. Pavlov proposed that by introducing the concept of emotions, an hysterical person's condition could be explained within the framework of his theory of higher nervous activity, thereby obviating the need to change his paradigm.

Animals↗

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I.P. Pavlov as a youth.

Ivan P. Pavlov's youthful relations with parents and siblings, formal education, and social activities in Riazan' are described. The Pavlovs, a highly achievement-oriented family descending from a lowly serf, improved their social status by serving the Russian Orthodox Church. Pavlov, the son of a priest, studied in the 1860s at the Riazan' Ecclesiastic Seminary for priesthood. The turbulent 1860s' decade was a period of social and political reforms. Western ideas and science were introduced to Russia. The ambitious and idealistic I.P. Pavlov was influenced by popular essays written by the journalist D.I. Pisarev, the works of the German physiologist J. Moleschott, the English writer G.H. Lewes, the German zoologist C. Vogt and the physiologist M.I. Sechenov. Losing his religious faith, Pavlov abandoned the traditional goal of becoming a priest, and, convinced that science was a road to truth and progress, left Riazan' to study natural science at the University of St. Petersburg.

Conditioning, Classical↗

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I.P. Pavlov vs. N.I. Bukharin: the critical mind and the arrogance of power.

In 1923, Pavlov criticized the Marxist theses and the policy of the Soviet regime. In 1924, N.I. Bukharin, a Marxist theoretician and member of the Soviet government, responded to Pavlov's passionate speech with a sarcastic diatribe. I suggest that Pavlov's speech and Bukharin's article represent a conflict between a scientist critical of the Marxist pseudotheory and a journalist's abusive response to the realization that his theory was without much merit.

Communism↗

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Pavlov's position toward Konorski and Miller's distinction between Pavlovian and motor conditioning paradigms.

Two Warsaw medical students, Jerzy Konorski and Stefan Miller, having read I.P. Pavlov's works on conditional reflexes, informed him in a 1928 letter that they had discovered a new type of conditioning. A previously neutral stimulus preceded the passive lifting of a dog's paw which then was followed by feeding; this stimulus then evoked the spontaneous raising of that paw. Pavlov responded informing them that their conditioning of motor responses expanded his theory of higher nervous activity, but that their conditioning paradigm-that they named CRII-did not differ fundamentally from the Pavlovian conditioning paradigm. The replication of the Warsaw experiment in Pavlov's laboratory failed to provide unequivocal results. From 1931 to 1933, Konorski, working in Pavlov's Leningrad laboratory, further explored the parameters of CRII. Pavlov insisted that the conditioning of motor movements differs from the conditioning of other sensory analyzers only in that, on the neural level, the motor analyzer is both afferent, that is, perceptive, and efferent, that is, responsive. Konorski was not convinced, and he subsequently maintained that the two conditioning paradigms were fundamentally different.

Animals↗

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Pavlov's position on the effects of decortication on conditional reflexes.

This paper examined D. Joravsky's (1989) hypothesis that I.P. Pavlov dogmatically refused to acknowledge that classical conditioning can be mediated by subcortical regions of the large cerebral hemispheres. Decortication literature from 1901 to 1936 was reviewed. The early studies available to Pavlov, who died in 1936, showed that decortication does not allow the establishment of new or retaining of old conditional reflexes (CRs). G.P. Zelenyĭ's later experiments(1930) suggested that the establishment of primitive CRs in decorticated dogs was possible. Pavlov never denied this possibility but cautioned that Zelenyĭ's experiments could have been methodologically flawed. Although Joravsky's original hypothesis on Pavlov's position on the relation between decortication and the establishment of CRs is by and large accepted, it must be stressed that Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity was primarily concerned with the function of the brain in the higher organism's struggle for existence. Within this context the cortical, rather than subcortical, processes play the decisive role in the organism's adaptation to the changing external environment.

Animals↗

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The Pavlovian "principle of strength".

The Pavlovian principle of strength assumed that the magnitude of the conditional response is a linear function of the intensity of the external conditional stimulus. But experiments failed to provide evidence for the universality of the principle. The Pavlovians tried to identify conditions that distorted the linearity of this relationship. Some of the disturbing conditions were external and some were internal intervening variables. It is possible that the relation between the strength of the conditional stimulus and the magnitude of the conditional response is not linear but logarithmic. Pavlov acknowledged the lack of experimental evidence to support the principle of strength in its original form.

Animals↗

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Hypnosis and inhibition as viewed by Heidenhain and Pavlov.

About 1880, Rudolf Heidenhain, then Professor of Physiology and Histology at the University of Breslau, experimentally studied hypnotic phenomena. Heidenhain explained hypnosis physiologically, in terms of cortical inhibition. Subsequently, I.P. Pavlov, who in 1877 and again in 1884 was Heidenhain's student at Breslau, encountered hypnotic phenomena during conditional reflex experiments. In 1910, Pavlov described hypnotic states and explained them (as had Heidenhain three decades earlier), in terms of partial inhibition of the cortex. As the concepts of inhibition and excitation are cornerstones of Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity, it is of historical interest to search for influences that led Pavlov to incorporate the concept of inhibition into his theory. It is most likely that Pavlov first encountered the concept of central inhibition in the 1860s when reading I.M. Sechenov's The Reflexes of the Brain (1863/1866) and that the importance of the concept was augmented by Heidenhain's use of it in explaining hypnotic phenomena.

History, 19th Century↗

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Pavlov's conceptualization of unconditional reflexes, or instincts, within the framework of the theory of higher nervous activity.

According to I. P. Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity, the establishment and dissolution of conditional reflexes enhances the higher organism's adaptation to the external environment. Pavlov asserted that, ontogenetically, conditional reflexes are based upon innate, unconditional reflexes (UR) or instincts. Pavlov did not distinguish between URs and instincts, but he preferred the former term. Phylogenetically the URs emerged out of well-established conditional reflexes during the development of higher organisms. An outgrowth of the experimental conditioning procedure, developed during the second decade of this century, was the observation and delineation of new URs. While studying human nervous and psychiatric disorders in the 1930s, Pavlov elucidated other URs. Pavlov identified 13 major URs, but he failed to formulate an exhaustive classification scheme of URs.

Animals↗

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Pavlov and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Despite the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early 1920's, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research found ways to assist I.P. Pavlov. In addition to providing scientific literature and financial aid, these institutions and their officers rendered important moral support to the scientific career of Pavlov during his later years. In 1923, as a guest of the Rockefeller Institute, Pavlov visited American scientific laboratories. In 1924, he requested and received a number of books on physiology, and during the 1930's the Foundation helped him to acquire equipment for his Leningrad laboratory.

Academies and Institutes↗

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A comparative analysis of the conditional reflex discoveries of Pavlov and Twitmyer, and the birth of a paradigm.

Research on conditional reflex (CR) in Pavlov's Physiological Laboratory has preceded Twitmyer's work on conditioning at the University of Pennsylvania by 3 or 4 years. The events in Pavlov's laboratory lead toward the postulation of a new paradigm that rejected the Cartesians conceptualization of the reflex as a mechanistic response to stimuli by replacing it with the Darwinian notion of the organism's adaptation to the environmental conditions. The Pavlovian paradigm rejected the Wundtian method in favor of the objective, conditional reflex method.

Animals↗

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Pavlov and the Nobel Prize Award.

When Pavlov was first nominated for the Nobel Prize, he was well recognized by physiologists, especially those concerned with digestion. It appears unlikely that psychological interpretations of his conditional reflex findings had begun to penetrate deeply into the discipline of psychology. The selection in 1904 of Pavlov for the award in physiology or medicine attracted the attention of a broader range of scientists. American psychologists, in particular, probably became more aware of the advantages of incorporating his "objective" conditional reflex method into their investigations. General biographical aspects relating to the award and the effect of the award upon the acceptance of the conditional reflex method by American psychologists are developed in this presentation.

Animals↗

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The second signal system as conceived by Pavlov and his disciples.

Pavlov clearly formulated his ideas on the second signal system (specifically, language) in the 1930s. This occurred in conjunction with his interest in interspecies differences and in the study of human neuroses. Pavlov proposed that conditional reflexes signal concrete reality while symbolic-language provides abstractions of reality. Phylogenetically, language emerged in the humans because this form of communication had survival value to the species. Pavlov's disciples L. A. Orbeli and N. I. Krasnogorskiĭ had considered the ontogenetic development of language. The experimental investigation of A. G. Ivanov-Smolenskiĭ extended Pavlov's empirical study of the function of language in psychopathology. Notwithstanding a sustained interest in language, Pavlov did not develop a theory of language acquisition based upon the conditioning principle. Pavlov's conceptualization of language may not have been original, nor did it contribute significantly to modern linguistics. It is now mainly of historical interest. It was, nevertheless, important to the conceptualization of neuroses within the context of the theory of higher nervous activity and it had far-reaching political implications for Soviet psychology in the immediate post-World War II period.

Animals↗

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Schilder and Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity. A critique and apologia.

In the late 1920s, the Viennese psychoanalyst Paul Schilder, after performing a conditioning experiment with human subjects, criticized I. P. Pavlov's concept of "experimental neurosis." Schilder maintained that subjective reports by conditioned human subjects were more informative than the objectively observed behavior of conditioned dogs. In 1932, Pavlov published a rejoinder to Schilder's critique in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Pavlov maintained that Schilder misunderstood the value and implications of the scientific, objective method in the study of experimental neurosis. In 1934, Schilder subjected Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity to an incisive critique in a 1935 article in Imago. Schilder objected to Pavlov's narrow, reductionist conceptualization of the conditional reflex. Schilder reiterated his view that the psychological, subjective explanation of the conditional reflex is preferable to the physiological, objective explanation, and that the inference of cortical phenomena from experimental findings might be improper. Neither Pavlov nor any of his disciples replied to Schilder. The author provides an apology for the Pavlovian position, suggesting that Schilder was unfamiliar with early and late writings of Pavlov.

Animals↗

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The discovery of the principles of reinforcement, extinction, generalization, and differentiation of conditional reflexes in Pavlov's laboratories.

The discovery of reinforcement, extinction, generalization, and differentiation with the conditional reflex method in Pavlov's laboratories is described. Modern American introductory texts show that contemporary understanding of the experimental work on conditioning in Pavlov's laboratories is derived from a 1927 English translation of Pavlov's lectures on the conditional reflexes. The lectures present the discoveries topically, not chronologically. In contrast, this article presents a chronological account of the contributions of S.G. Vul'fson, I.F. Tolochinov, and B.P. Babkin, which led to the conceptualization of reinforcement and extinction, and the work of V.N. Boldyrev and N.A. Kashereninova, which led to the formulation of the concepts of generalization and differentiation. This historical approach avoids giving the impression that the development of the Pavlovian paradigm was a highly systematic pursuit.

Animals↗

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Orbeli's experimental work on color discrimination in dogs.

In the 1900's, L.A. Orbeli, on I.P. Pavlov's request, attempted to establish color discrimination in dogs. Previous experiments used the motor discrimination method and gave inconsistent results. In contrast, Orbeli used the salivary conditional reflex method, which he considered to be more precise than the method that relied on erratic movements of a dog. After experimentation that lasted about one and a half years, Orbeli failed to establish color discrimination. When subsequent experiments by Russians and Germans yielded positive results with the motor discrimination method, Orbeli switched to this method and also obtained positive results. These findings were confirmed by most subsequent experiments on color discrimination in dogs. The utility of Pavlovian conditioning in sensory experimentation was not universally justified and its importance was greater in the study of learning.

Animals↗

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Pavlov, psychoanalysis, and neuroses.

Pavlov's discovery of experiment neurosis was serendipitous, yet it was made under the influence of Breuer and Freud's case of Anna O. In 1914, Pavlov's disciple N. R. Shenger-Krestovnikova, exploring the limits of visual discrimination in dogs, noticed that when the discrimination was difficult, the dogs' behavior became disorganized. Pavlov drew an analogy between the condition of Shenger-Krestovnikova's dogs and their disorganized behavior with Anna O.'s situation and her neurotic reaction. Pavlov concluded that he had demonstrated in the laboratory the elements of neurosis in animals and human alike. Schilder's criticism of his position, his later study of human neuroses in clinical settings, and the views of Janet may have induced Pavlov to differentiate between animal and human neuroses.

Animals↗

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Pavlov and the concept of association.

I. P. Pavlov was profoundly influenced during his youth by the writings of D. I. Pisarev and I. M. Sechenov. Sechenov explained the voluntary act in terms of the formation of associations among sensory impressions and motor responses. Apparently under Pisarev's influence, Pavlov studied the physiology of the circulatory and digestive systems. In explaining the formation of the conditional reflex (CR), Pavlov rejected the Wundtian, anthropomorphic conceptualization of CR as suggested by A. T. Snarskiĭ. However, using the objective CR method, the Pavlovians experimentally investigated the formation in the cortex of neural connections, which were equated with associations.

Animals↗

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Pavlov as a psychologist. A reappraisal.

American psychologists are informed on Pavlov's work on conditional reflexes but not on the full development of his theory of higher nervous activity. This article shows that Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity dealt with concepts that concerned contemporary psychologists. Pavlov used the conditioning of the salivary reflex for methodological purposes. Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity encompassed overt behavior, neural processes, and the conscious experience. The strong Darwinian element of Pavlov's theory, with its stress on the higher organisms' adaptation, is described. With regard to learning, Pavlov, at the end of his scholarly career, proposed that although all learning involves the formation of associations, the organism's adaptation to the environment is established through conditioning, but the accumulation of knowledge is established by trial and error.

Animals↗