These enduring errors largely were due to the initial, poor translation of Pavlov’s writings, lack of subsequent scholarship and the ensuing misconceptions about his true scientific aims. It just left him alone because he was so famous. Was he a pampered pet of the Soviet hierarchy, supported lavishly so he could be trotted out as the emblem of Marxist science? No, he was a vocal, acerbic critic of the Soviet regime. To describe the dogs’ responses, he didn’t even use the Russian word for “conditioned.” Instead, he used the word for “conditional,” which has a far different meaning-and was erroneously translated.
He was a detached, cold, analytical behaviorist, interested only in physical reflexes that could be “conditioned.” No, he passionately tried to determine what those reflexes reveal about the workings of the mind. No, he won it in 1904 for his work analyzing how the nervous system controls digestion, long before he began the studies that captured the public’s imagination. He won the Nobel Prize for discovering this “conditioned” reflex. Different levels of stimuli were designed to elicit different responses. No, he never used a bell he used metronomes, harmoniums, electric shock or other stimuli that could be measured more precisely. He trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. Most of what we believe we know about Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), the iconic Russian physiologist, is wrong. Forget what you thought you knew about him.
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