You remember Ivan Pavlov from 9th grade biology, don’t you? Maybe this will ring a bell: Pavlov’s Dogs. Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist who would go onto win the 1904 Nobel Prize in medicine for his important research into the digestive system. But that’s not what he’s most known for. Ivan became interested in the laboratory dogs where he worked. He noticed that they would salivate every time they saw a lab coat. In fact, as residents of the lab, the dogs were always fed by a person in a lab coat so the little mutts began to associate food with the coats (whether or not food was present) and would spontaneously salivate/drool merely at the sight of the coats alone. Pavlov found this fascinating and studied this “conditioned behavior†more closely. Dogs actually salivate unconditionally when food is presented to them as an evolutionary mechanism in preparation to break down the food they are about to receive, and to swallow the food more easily. But Pavlov was interested in conditioning this response. He would ring a bell every time he was about to feed the dogs until they began to associate food with the sound of a bell. Eventually, the dogs would salivate at the sound of the bell even if food was not put in front of them. This was a major scientific breakthrough in terms of the study of the mind and behavior. Carl Jung would go onto follow Pavlov’s work and conditioned responses are a core part of more than you might think – from therapy to cure anxiety to the study of advertising.
