Pavlov Quotes

“Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise.

I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.”
― Nikola Tesla, Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla

“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, Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side

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

“Eventually, even Pavlov found that when he heard a bell he had the overwhelming urge to feed a dog.”
― Julian K. Jarboe, Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel

“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 Mechanistic Conception of Life

“People are savages. Their civilized behaviour is only a conditioned response.”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the simplest example [of learning 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 Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols: Adapted from the Journals of John H. Watson, M.D.

“Pavlov’s dogs will drool at the site of any food,
So go ahead and ring the bell,
Sing a classical song about it and
Then advertises what sells”
― Charmaine J Forde

“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, The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

“In a letter dated October 10, 1934, to Kaminskii (then the commissar of health) - a letter that was a response to the commissar's birthday congratulations to Pavlov on the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday - Pavlov wrote about his attitude toward the October Revolution, which was 'almost directly opposite' Kaminskii's, for whom the revolution 'imbues the motherland's wonderful movement forward with courage.' On the contrary, Pavlov saw 'its enormous truly negative aspects' in the 'long-standing terror and unchecked willfulness of power,' which transformed 'our nature, which was besides rather Asiatic, into a shameful-slavish one ... And can you do much good with slaves?' Pavlov answered his own question thus '[For] pyramids, yes; but not for common genuine human happiness.”
― Evgeny Dobrenko, Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics