Ivan Pavlov by Daniel Todes;

Author:Daniel Todes; [Todes, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195105148
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2015-02-24T14:04:59+00:00

The digestive machine was especially complicated because it was inhabited by a sort of “ghost”; namely, the animal’s psyche—its personality and changing moods, and its food preferences. Remember that earlier, Pavlov and Ekaterina Shumova-Simonovskaia had proved the important role of appetite in making gastric juice flow. If a dog enjoyed eating food, the gastric glands in the stomach began to produce juice even if the food never actually reached the stomach. “Appetite,” Pavlov wrote, “is the first and mightiest exciter” of gastric juice in the stomach.

One of Pavlov’s first experiments in his new laboratory showed that if an animal was hungry enough, this gastric juice flowed even if the animal merely saw a piece of food. (Some scientists had actually noticed this years before, but they could not make it occur regularly in a laboratory—and so could not convince their colleagues that this was a normal part of digestion.)

This ghost did not act the same way every time. Pavlov noticed that, just like people, different dogs like different foods, and that a dog’s food preferences change from day to day and moment to moment. Also like people, dogs have different personalities. Some dogs were “greedier” for food than others, and so they produced more appetite juice. Some dogs were “dreamier” than others: these dogs would be more likely to get their gastric juices flowing just by seeing food. Other dogs were more “cold-blooded”: Their gastric glands did not start working until the food was actually in their mouths. Some dogs were “cunning” and easily insulted: If the experimenter showed some food to such a dog without actually feeding it, the dog might think it was being teased and react much as a hungry person would in that situation; that is, it would get angry and turn away from the experimenter rather than producing gastric juice in eager anticipation of a meal.

For these reasons, the personality and mood of a dog added an unpredictable element to the digestive machine. In characterizing his dogs’ mood and personality, Pavlov was influenced both by the patterns of gastric flow and by subjective interpretations of the dogs’ behavior. The main point is that these experiments did not turn out exactly the same each time. For precisely this reason—that the dogs’ psyche did not behave predictably—Pavlov did not think it was a simple reflex.

Another important fact was this: Without “appetite juice,” most foods did not get digested. They just remained in the stomach until they rotted. The ghost in the digestive machine—appetite and personality—clearly played a very important role in its function.

Pavlov thought that his experiments explained why some people had problems digesting their food. Too often people ate hurriedly, without paying attention to their food, or they were worried and preoccupied at meals. For this reason, they did not produce the necessary “appetite juice” to digest their food. Although people had not understood this scientifically, they had developed habits and customs to increase their appetite. For example, there was a good scientific basis for having

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.