Ivan Pavlov: A Gateway to His Life, Ideas, and Legacy

The dogs. The bell. The drool. Almost everything you think you know about Ivan Pavlov is wrong. He never built his science on a bell. He won his Nobel Prize for digestion, not conditioning. And the word everyone knows him by is a mistranslation. He was also stranger, and braver, than the caricature allows: a priest's son who was an atheist by his seminary years and still defended the church against its Bolshevik persecutors; a man the regime kept in rations and laboratories while he denounced it to its face; who demanded cold objectivity at the bench and wept over the arrests of his students beyond it. Ivan Pavlov: A Gateway to His Life, Ideas, and Legacy recovers the real scientist from the cartoon. It follows him from a provincial parsonage to the summit of world physiology - through the "physiology factory" that bottled and sold dog gastric juice to fund the laboratory, the soundproof Tower of Silence built so that nothing could reach an animal unplanned, the 1924 Leningrad flood that left his dogs changed, and the stray observation, a nuisance in a digestion experiment, that he turned into a whole science of learning. Inside, you'll find: - Why he called the reflex conditional, not conditioned - and how one mistranslation hardened a century of psychology - The year he announced that learning could be inherited, and the footnote three years later in which he quietly took it back - Where his grand theory of the brain failed, and which of his findings still stand >Part of the Pioneers of Human Behaviour series - gateway books on the minds that shaped us. Whether you are a student, a professional, or simply curious about why a chime teaches your hand to move before you have decided anything, this is the honest, illuminating introduction to one of the most misunderstood scientists of his century.