Pavlov Quotes

Science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching. ~ Ivan Pavlov

In 1965, a psychologist named Martin Seligman started shocking dogs.
He was trying to expand on the research of Pavlov--the guy who could make dogs salivate when they heard a bell ring. Seligman wanted to head in the other direction, and when he rang his bell, instead of providing food, he zapped the dogs with electricity. To keep them still, he restrained them in a harness during the experiment. After they were conditioned, he put these dogs in a big box with a little fence dividing it into two halves. He figured if the dog rang the bell, it would hop over the fence to escape, but it didn't. It just sat there and braced itself. They decided to try shocking the dog after the bell. The dog still just sat there and took it. When they put a dog in the box that had never been shocked before or had previously been allowed to escape and tried to zap it--it jumped the fence.
You are just like these dogs.
If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you convince yourself over time that there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act--you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.
Studies of the clinically depressed show that they often give in to defeat and stop trying. . .
Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up op ~ David McRaney

I'd say 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company (we're the biggest share-holder). They want to be associated with every wonderful image: heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don't want to be associated with presidents' funerals and so-forth. ~ Charlie Munger

The difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. There are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do, and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanisation. If you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd, because if money becomes the goal–and it does if you work that way–you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a handful of crisp one dollar bills and practically water your mouth over it, but this is a kind of person who is confused like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell. ~ Alan W. Watts

In the case of the stomach, however, the nerves of the glandular cells were always severed when constructing an artificially isolated pouch and this, naturally, affected the normal work of the stomach. ~ Ivan Pavlov

Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise. ~ Ivan Pavlov

The final war will be between Pavlov's dog and Schoedinger's Cat. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Finally, as the digestive canal is a complex system, a series of separate chemical laboratories, I cut the connections between them in order to investigate the course of phenomena in each particular laboratory; thus I resolved the digestive canal into several separate parts. ~ Ivan Pavlov

But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods. ~ Ivan Pavlov

I must endure, fighting the temptation simply to become slack-jawed like most of my school 'peers' (they wish!), who will themselves into a collective, vacant, trancelike state for the duration of each class. (Although I sometimes secretly envy their ability to empty their minds completely for a full fifty minutes, reanimating only at the sound of a bell, like Pavlov's dogs ... ) ~ Beth Fantaskey

Appetite, craving for food, is a constant and powerful stimulator of the gastric glands. ~ Ivan Pavlov

The digestive canal represents a tube passing through the entire organism and communicating with the external world, i.e. as it were the external surface of the body, but turned inwards and thus hidden in the organism. ~ Ivan Pavlov

If we ever do end up acting just like rats or Pavlov's dogs, it will be largely because behaviorism has conditioned us to do so. ~ Richard Rosen

I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog. ~ William Stafford

Men have been trained and conditioned by women, not unlike the way Pavlov conditioned his dogs, into becoming their slaves. ~ Esther Vilar

I'm not close to him." He looked at me defiantly. "But he's put his whole life into this. He's no Freud or Jung or Pavlov or Watson, but he's doing something important and I respect his dedication - maybe even more because he's just an ordinary man trying to do a great man's work, while the great men are all busy making bombs. ~ Daniel Keyes

In the dog two conditions were found to produce pathological disturbances by functional interference, namely, an unusually acute clashing of the excitatory and inhibitory processes, and the influence of strong and extraordinary stimuli. In man precisely similar conditions constitute the usual causes of nervous and psychic disturbances. Different conditions productive of extreme excitation, such as intense grief or bitter insults, often lead, when the natural reactions are inhibited by the necessary restraint, to profound and prolonged loss of balance in nervous and psychic activity. ~ Ivan Pavlov

Very, very good Pavlov, all your dogs have barked when you rang the bell. Your test was successful. ~ Triple H

Pavlov was fascinated with the "ideas of the opposite". Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to disintiguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission….but when somehow – starve them, traumatize, castrate them send them over into one of the transmarginal phases, past borders of their waking selves, past equivalent and paradoxical phases – you weaken this idea of the opposite, and here all at once is the paranoid patient, who would be master, yet now feels himself a slave…..who would be loved, but suffers his world's indifference, and "I think", Pavlov writing to Janet, "it is precisely the ultraparadoxical phase which is the base of the weakening of the idea of the opposite in our patients. Our madmen, , our paranoid, maniac, schizoid, morally imbecilic.
Spectro shakes his head. "You are putting response before stimulus. Not at all. Think about it. He is out there, he can feel them coming, days in advance, but it is a reflex. A reflex to something that is in the air right now, something were too coarsely put together to sense, but Slothrop can. ~ Thomas Pynchon

If canines can be conditioned to salivate over nonexistent food, may not men one day be likewise taught to salivate at the prospect of nonexistent facts? ~ Nicholas Meyer

Our experiments not only proved the existence of a nervous apparatus in the above-mentioned glands, but also disclosed some facts clearly showing the participation of these nerves in normal activity. ~ Ivan Pavlov

As was to be expected, the discovery of the nervous apparatus of the salivary glands immediately impelled physiologists to seek a similar apparatus in other glands lying deeper in the digestive canal. ~ Ivan Pavlov

Never think that you already know all. However highly you are appraised, always have the courage to say to yourself-I am ignorant. ~ Ivan Pavlov

If Pavlov tested his cat he would have failed. ~ Patrick H.T. Doyle

If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere. ~ Ivan Pavlov

It is still open to question whether psychology is a natural science, or whether it can be regarded as a science at all. ~ Ivan Pavlov

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong
and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.
Tell him to be different from other people
if it comes natural and easy being different.
Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.
Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural.
Then he may understand Shakespeare
and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,
Michael Faraday and free imaginations
Bringing changes into a world resenting change.
He will be lonely enough
to have time for the work
he knows as his own. ~ Carl Sandburg

Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them. ~ Ivan Pavlov

Spirituality belongs to the eternal, and religion belongs to the temporal. Religion belongs to people's behavior. It is really what Pavlov, Skinner, Delgado and others call a conditioning of the behavior. The child is brought up by Christians - then he is conditioned in one way, he becomes a Christian. ~ Rajneesh

Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object, and when the human mind will contemplate itself not from within but from without. ~ Ivan Pavlov

Since Pawlow and his pupils have succeeded in causing the secretion of saliva in the dog by means of optic and acoustic signals, it no longer seems strange to us that what the philosopher terms an 'idea' is a process which can cause chemical changes in the body. ~ Jacques Loeb

The Sun-Paul must consider only one thing: what is the relation of this or that external reaction of the animal to the phenomena of the external world? ~ Ivan Pavlov

People are savages. Their civilized behaviour is only a conditioned response. ~ Ljupka Cvetanova

It isn't the sort of argument Pointsman relishes either. But he glances sharply at this young anarchist in his red scarf. "Pavlov believed that the ideal, the end we all struggle toward in science, is the true mechanical explanation. He was realistic enough not to expect it in his lifetime. Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better and better approximations. His faith ultimately lay in a pure physiological basis for the life of the psyche. No effect without cause, and a clear train of linkages.

"It's not my forte, of course," Mexico honestly wishing not to offend the man, but really, "but there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less . . . sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle."

"No - not 'strike off.' Regress. You're 30 years old, man. There are no 'other angles.' There is only forward - into it – or backward. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Dressed in their red suits and fake beards, they rang their bells like they were going for dog-spit gold at the Pavlov Olympics. ~ Christopher Moore

Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the simplest example [of leaning without consciousness]. If a light signal immediately followed by a puff of air through a rubber tube is directed at a person's eye about ten times, the eyelid, which previously blinked only to the puff of air, will begin to blink to the light signal alone, and this becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed. Subjects who have undergone this well-known procedure of signal learning report that it has no conscious component whatever. Indeed, consciousness, in this example the intrusion of voluntary eye blinks to try to assist the signal learning, blocks it from occurring. ~ Julian Jaynes

The gastric laboratory uses its protein ferment under an acid reaction. ~ Ivan Pavlov

The truth is, Pavlov's dog trained Pavlov to ring this bell just before the dog salivated. ~ George Carlin

Thanks to our present surgical methods in physiology we can demonstrate at any time almost all phenomena of digestion without the loss of even a single drop of blood, without a single scream from the animal undergoing the experiment. ~ Ivan Pavlov

One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of Galileo has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the most complicated relations of the animal to the external world. And it seems, and not without reason, that now is the really critical moment for natural science; for the brain, in its highest complexity - the human brain - which created and creates natural science, itself becomes the object of this science. ~ Ivan Pavlov

I am pain-stricken to say, that today's so-called modern humans are all like the dogs in Pavlov's experiment. Pavlov used a bell to manipulate the mind of his dogs, and today, social media platforms are using people's own beloved smartphones to manipulate them. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Only by observing this condition would the results of our work be regarded as fully conclusive and as having elucidated the normal course of the phenomena. ~ Ivan Pavlov

So that's the telephone? They ring, and you run. ~ Edgar Degas

I am convinced that an important stage of human thought will have been reached when the physiological and the psychological, the objective and the subjective, are actually united, when the tormenting conflicts or contradictions between my consciousness and my body will have been factually resolved or discarded. ~ Ivan Pavlov

But Pavlov purely for a good purpose. Pavlov for friendliness and trust and compassion. Whereas you prefer to use Pavlov for brainwashing, Pavlov for selling cigarettes and vodka and patriotism. Pavlov for the benefit of dictators, generals and tycoons. ~ Aldous Huxley

Learn, compare, collect the facts! ~ Ivan Pavlov