“The movement of plants toward the light and the seeking of truth through a mathematical analysis - are these not phenomena belonging to the same order?” he wondered. By weaving together webs of these connections, he hoped to capture the ineffable. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response. But for all the important details that are emerging, we are still just poking at the surface of the phenomenon that most fascinates us: the mind driving the curiosity that gives rise to science, art, literature, music, the highest human endeavors.įor Pavlov, the pieces - the atoms - were the simplest measurable associations. Gathering last month for the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, researchers reported their readings from microelectrodes, PET scans and optogenetic sensors - instruments that have far surpassed the precision of Pavlov’s tools. The Brain Initiative was preceded, in the 1990s, by the Decade of the Brain, which was followed (as if the easier problems had been solved) by the Decade of the Mind. Todes’s book, I kept wondering how much we have really accomplished since Pavlov’s time. Our brains have been conditioned with the myth. Yet when we hear his name, we reflexively think of a drooling dog and a clanging bell.
That was also Pavlov’s goal: to build a science that would “brightly illuminate our mysterious nature” and “our consciousness and its torments.” He spoke those words 111 years ago and spent his life pursuing his goal. Todes, a medical historian, describes a man whose laboratory in pre-Soviet Russia was like an early-20th-century version of the White House Brain Initiative, with its aim “to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind.”
In an excellent new biography, “ Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science,” Daniel P.
This is not the Pavlov most people think they know.
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