Pavlov’s parables

Pavlov’s parables

STEPHEN LOVELL

TLS(The Times Literary Suppliement),

 

 28 October 2015

Ivan Pavlov, 1930, by Mikhail Nesterov Photograph: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images 

 

We hope you enjoy this piece from the TLS, which is available every Thursday in print and via the TLS app. Also in this week’s issue: the fight to save New York Public Library; shooting wasps with the Sitwells; new poems by Andrew Motion and Jennie Feldman; celebrating 400 years since the completion of Don Quixote; how Pop art really made its mark – and much more.

 

For all its engrossing detail, it is hard not to read Ivan Pavlov: A Russian life in science as a parable of modern Russia. In Ivan Pavlov we have the archetypal collision between religion and secular modernity: a priest’s son and seminary boy from the provinces who made the break to St Petersburg University in 1870 and became a defiant positivist. Conditioned not only by the scientistic turn of the 1860s in Russia, but also by the accelerating industrialization of the later nineteenth century, Pavlov adopted factory methods in his own labs, presiding over an elaborate programme of minutely empirical studies. The scale and integrated character of his research secured him international renown with the award of a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work on the digestive system.

By then Pavlov had shown like no one else the benefits of technological innovation and quantitative analysis for overcoming mind–body dualism. Thanks to ingenious surgical methods and hygienic lab conditions, his team was able to conduct precise measurements – above all, of the gastric secretions of dogs – that seemed to provide an objective calibration of nervous and even psychic phenomena. Pavlov’s trademark esophagotomy meant that food swallowed by a dog never reached the digestive tract, thus allowing the researcher to isolate the psychic rather than chemical causes of secretion. His key analytical concept, the conditional reflex, soon entered the scientific lexicon and even journalistic parlance. His international prestige only increased in the second half of his life, building to a climax with his hosting of the International Physiological Congress in Leningrad just months before his death in early 1936. Such was the momentum of Pavlov’s project to fuse body and mind in a single explanatory model that it gathered further steam under Russia’s new masters after the civil war. From the mid-1920s, Pavlov had state funding lavished on him. Although he was an outspoken critic of the new regime, his enormous international prestige and the materialistic bent of his research made him effectively a Soviet aristocrat. In 1927, he was assigned a Lincoln and a chauffeur, while in 1935 a bottle of champagne was flown in from Finland to aid his recovery from a dangerous bout of bronchitis. The authorities even paid for delegates to the 1935 congress to be treated to a banquet in a tsarist palace.

Yet, as Daniel P. Todes shows with unremitting perspicacity, Pavlov is too big, complicated and even self-contradictory a figure to be contained by the parable. His aura of exemplar is most obviously tarnished by the messiness of any life as actually lived. His rise to prominence depended as much on chance as on his own irresistible intellectual achievements. In his early career he did not cultivate the most advantageous patrons, and spent a few years training as a physician rather than devoting himself full-time to the research that really interested him. At the age of forty, he faced the prospect of career stagnation, having just failed to land two of the main professorships in his field of physiology. His lucky break came in the early 1890s, when he acquired the lab of his dreams in the newly created Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine, combining this with a professorship at the Military-Medical Academy.

Thereafter, the breaks kept on coming until they became the routine dividends of fame and power. Pavlov was not an automatic choice for the Nobel Prize – some of his conclusions had come under fire, he had delivered no knock-out single discovery or application, and a sceptic might have said that he had simply got better than anyone else at inserting gastric fistulas in dogs – but by 1904, after a couple of near misses in the preceding years, he had an important advocate on the committee, Johan Erik Johansson, professor of physiology at the Karolinska Institute. During the revolution and civil war, Pavlov experienced acute hardship and uncertainty in hungry, disease-ridden Petrograd, but he soon asserted himself vis-à-vis the new regime, flirting with emigration and lobbying effectively for resources. Under the Bolsheviks, he was able to follow his nose without ever being forced to come up with firm conclusions or (still less) to demonstrate their real-world applications. Funding bodies in liberal countries would hardly have been so open-ended in their commitment. Yet, towards the end of his life, Bolshevik violence was coming very close to home: by the mid-1930s, Pavlov was almost routinely saving his colleagues from imprisonment and likely death. While his personal authority still counted, he found himself increasingly adopting the tone of petitioner that he had proudly eschewed in his earlier dealings with the Soviet state. His visceral opposition to Bolshevism was further sapped by his enduring patriotism, which was heightened by the threatening international politics of the mid-1930s, and his sense of obligation to a state that had provided him with luxurious research facilities for more than a decade.

The twists and turns of Pavlov’s biography were matched by the tensions in his personality. Although himself a convinced atheist, in 1881 he married a devout fellow provincial who had come to St Petersburg to study on the recently established pedagogical courses for women. In the days of their courtship, he had to reckon with her enthusiasm for the messianic Fyodor Dostoevsky, swapping impressions of The Brothers Karamazov as it first came out. Much later, after more than twenty years of impeccably patriarchal family life, he formed a romantic attachment that would last the rest of his days. Pavlov’s lover and confidante after 1912 was Maria Petrova, by then only nominally the wife of the celebrity priest Grigory Petrov, who had thrown herself into a medical career in her late twenties and became Pavlov’s most devoted lab worker. Although Pavlov adhered to a strict daily routine, professed the value of self-discipline, and envisaged his labs as the domain of dispassionate rationality, he was possessed of a volcanic temper and regularly browbeat assistants who had the temerity to disagree with him or to follow their own hunches. Pavlov’s near fanatical pursuit of orderliness in his domestic and professional lives was evidently a way of taming his tempestuous nature and of minimizing the effects of the “random events” (sluchainosti) that he identified as the source of much human unhappiness.

Although Pavov was an outspoken critic of the new regime, his enormous international prestige and the materialistic bent of his research made him effectively a Soviet aristocrat

More interesting still is the extent to which these tensions were also present in Pavlov’s thinking. Like most other scientists of his generation, he professed the absolute authority of the “fact”. The task of the scientist was to accumulate a large amount of data from rigorously controlled and meticulously conducted experiments. The conclusions would then take care of themselves. Theorizing without data was worthless, and Pavlov was uncompromising in his critique of those he found guilty of this sin – for example, the Gestalt psychologists who ascribed a synthesizing “insight” to the chimpanzees they observed. The great strength of Pavlov’s method had always seemed to be its precision and quantifiability. A Pavlovian could say exactly how many drops of gastric juice were elicited by a metronome beat of 60 per minute that had come to be associated with a particular type of food. Experimental design could be made steadily more elaborate according to a simple binary pattern. According to Pavlov’s “nervist” model, all responses could be explained as a function of “excitation”, “inhibition”, or some interplay of the two. The ramifications of the binary could be analysed by varying the stimuli or playing off one stimulus against another (for example, an electric shock combined with feeding might become a conditional stimulus for salivation).

So far, so neat and tidy. The truth, however, was that Pavlov did not stick to this set of intellectual procedures. Here Todes’s biography proves not merely definitive, but redefining. Pavlov was in fact a highly intuitive thinker, and an ambitious one: he was always striving to make the biggest claims his “facts” would allow. His co-workers conducted hundreds of experiments to his precise instructions; his role was to survey the data they gathered and pick out, as Todes puts it, “the signal amid the noise”. The accumulation of experimental data actually made underlying patterns harder rather than easier to discern, which is where the art of interpretation came in. Pavlov often used metaphor to make the jump from analysis to synthesis. He liked to characterize the digestive system as a “chemical factory” and the mind as a “machine”; later on, as his attention switched from the mechanistic particulars to the psychical whole, he referred to the cortex as a “grandiose mosaic, a grandiose signalizing switchboard”.

The problem lay not only in the difficulty of identifying clear patterns even in apparently “objective”, quantitative data. It also had to do with Pavlov’s own intellectual restlessness. In the West, he has often been taken to have adopted an extremely mechanistic stimulus–response model of mental processing. He himself played his part in constructing this image, not least through the anthropomorphism of much of his research on dogs. But, as Todes notes, the biggest contribution to this misapprehension was made by his first translators, who erroneously rendered his key experimental concept as “conditioned” rather than “conditional” reflex. In combination with the stereotype of dogs salivating to bells, this has made Pavlov come across as a narrow determinist and as a scientist preoccupied with external phenomena rather than underlying causes. In America, he has been domesticated as a variety of behaviourist. But this is a very misleading view.

One part of the stereotype is correct: Pavlov and his co-workers spent a great deal of their time getting dogs to salivate (though their preferred stimuli were the buzzer and the metronome, not the bell). But, as Todes shows in an exposition both lucid and nuanced, that was merely the starting point. Dogs for Pavlov were experimental subjects rather than machines for replicating results. He and his colleagues developed close working relationships with their animals (even as they tortured them). Control groups were unthinkable: all the dogs were individuals. This allowed Pavlov to conduct elaborate sequences of experiments on the same dog, with multiple combinations of stimuli, but quickly forced him to confront an inconvenient fact: dogs, like human beings, were different. Excitation and inhibition were not universal mechanisms, but varied in their intensity and interrelations from one animal to the next. By 1924, Pavlov enjoyed excellent lab conditions, including the purpose-built “Towers of Silence” where dogs could be isolated from extraneous stimuli, but even this apparently most neutral of environments affected dogs in profoundly different ways. A psychiatrist, perhaps, would have welcomed this evidence of irreducible psychic variation, but a physiologist and determinist, such as Pavlov always remained, badly needed to find a way of accounting for it. The second half of Pavlov’s life may be regarded as one long search for a way of embracing the complexity without abandoning core mechanistic positions.

In the early days of Pavlov’s research “factory”, the main solution was to cling to a notion of the “normal” dog – in other words, one who could remain “happy” while having its digestive system permanently damaged by a pancreatic fistula. But in due course, Pavlov began to relish the variety of “nervous types” that he observed in his animals. once again, intuition played a leading part: he gravitated instinctively to the Hippocratic model, turning the four temperaments into nervous types. But he was too good an observer to believe that this adequately reflected the experimental data, and the list of acknowledged “intermediate types” lengthened inexorably. Metaphors and value judgements again provided some succour: Pavlov confidently categorized individual dogs as “strong” or “weak”, and built his analysis of their nervous systems around that assessment. But if his assistants produced results that did not fit existing categories, he simply increased the number of categories – or, more radically, the number of variables. In the early 1930s, for example, he dropped a quiet bombshell by telling his co-workers that nervous types could no longer be explained in terms of the excitation–inhibition binary, instead introducing the triad of strength, balance and lability. The moment of final synthesis was endlessly deferred, which caused him moments of acute self-doubt in the last decade of his life, just as his public authority was hardening into complete impermeability.

The underlying irony was that, from approximately the mid-point of his life, this world-renowned physiologist was in fact going after the psyche. Even if he still thought nervous impulses the best way of explaining the mind’s functioning, he was starting to push against the limits of his earlier explanatory models. In earlier days, he had taken “conditional reflexes” as a synonym for what the psychologists called “associations”. He attempted to prove the point by establishing in dogs longer chains of reflexes: not just light-equals-meat, but also metronome-equals-light-equals-meat. But these experiments did not yield satisfactory results: Pavlov had to admit that associations were broader than reflexes, and that the cumulative study of individual reflexes could not account for the “systematicity” of the nervous system.

The twists and turns of Pavlov’s biography were matched by the tensions in his personality

In the last decade of his life, as he came to acknowledge that the psychic whole was more than the sum of its nervous parts, his work took a distinctly psychiatric turn. No doubt this was partly the result of intellectual one-upmanship: he wanted to use his physiological toolkit to show the established specialists in the human mind the limits of their own aetiological speculations. But Pavlov’s interest in psychiatric abnormalities was also born of the sheer opportunism of any good researcher. Quite simply, a number of his dogs were nervous wrecks. In 1924, at least a couple of the animals were traumatized by their narrow escape from drowning during the Leningrad flood. Others were broken by the programme of experiments to which they were subjected – vivisection, isolation, electric shocks, jarring sounds. Earlier in his career, Pavlov might have discarded such animals as no longer “normal” and fit for purpose. Now they had become his most intriguing subjects: he analysed mental illness as a “break” caused by intolerable burdens on the nervous system. He was also more explicitly extrapolating from animals to humans. In the mid-1930s, he held court at “Clinical Wednesdays”, where he examined two or three patients and then delivered a diagnosis, with psychiatrists in silent and sceptical attendance.

Pavlov’s dogs also drew him into the nature-versus-nurture debate. It was plausible to suppose that variation in dogs’ nervous types could be explained by heredity and by their different life experiences before entering the clutches of his lab assistants. In the early 1920s, Pavlov endorsed research on mice that seemed to demonstrate the inheritance of acquired characteristics, only later to have to retreat from this position when the experimental results were shown to be flimsy. A few years later, with the creation, thanks to Bolshevik largesse, of a bucolic experimental station outside Leningrad, he had the opportunity to investigate heredity in a more controlled and convincing manner. Dogs could be reared in controlled environments as “free” or “imprisoned”, and multiple generations could be studied to investigate inherited characteristics.

Pavlov well understood that he would not live to see the results of the heredity project, but his research agenda of the 1920s and 30s made him more voluble than hitherto on the broader applications of his work. Science, in his view, could be an agent of social improvement on both fronts – nature and nurture. Subscribing to the pan-European eugenicist wisdom of the age, he argued that a more precise understanding of inherited characteristics in dogs would allow human beings to make more informed choices in their own breeding; so deeply held was this belief that Pavlov reacted to the death of his son Vsevolod by blaming himself for passing on the Mendelian inheritance of pancreatic cancer. As for nurture, he was caught up in the same dialectic of free will and determinism as the Bolsheviks themselves. Although a determinist to the tips of his fingers, he unquestionably believed in his own agency – not least in his capacity to stand above “facts” and remake them into scientific laws. He was also convinced that a correct understanding of the mechanisms of the brain would allow people to transcend their own determined existence and “direct energies” in a rational and wilful way. In this light, the attempts made by a few of Pavlov’s party-minded co-workers of the 1930s to bring the teachings of the great man in line with the dialectical and voluntarist spirit of the age were not entirely without foundation.

Even in his mid-eighties, Pavlov had not lost the capacity to expand his intellectual horizons and to question his own assumptions, although he still exploded at others who dared to challenge him. If he had lived to be a hundred, as both he and the Soviet propaganda industry hoped, perhaps he would have become a Marxist, or at least the dialectical materialist that Pravda had claimed him to be on his eightieth birthday. It is certainly arguable that there was influence in the other direction: the Bolshevik ideal of remaking man through a variety of stimuli – from excitation (inspiration and incentives) to inhibition (terror) – was more than a little Pavlovian.

Daniel Todes has spent more than twenty years with his subject, and has evidently approached his task with the same dedication that Pavlov kept up through his many decades in the lab. Todes’s sources range from the whimsical and self-revealing “journal” with which Pavlov wooed his future wife in 1879 to NKVD surveillance reports on his mood more than half a century later, from documents on the student Pavlov’s very first research into nervous control of the organs to taped interviews with his co-workers several decades after his death. The result is history of science at its intricate best.

Stephen Lovell is is Professor of Modern History at King’s College London. His most recent book is Russia in the Microphone Age: A history of Soviet radio, 1919–1970, which was published earlier this year.