by Simon Ings
20. Quoted in Jean-Gaël Barbara and Jean-Claude Dupont, History of the Neurosciences in France and Russia: From Charcot and Sechenov to IBRO (Hermann, 2011), p. 188.
21. Julia Kursell, ‘Piano Mécanique and Piano Biologique: Nikolai Bernstein’s Neurophysiological Study of Piano Touch’, Configurations 14, no. 3 (2006), pp. 245–73.
22. Irina E. Sirotkina and Elena V Biryukova, ‘Futurism in Physiology: Nikolai Bernstein, Anticipation, and Kinaesthetic Imagination’, Anticipation: Learning from the Past: The Russian/Soviet Contributions to the Science of Anticipation, ed. Mihai Nadin.
23. Onno G. Meijer and Sjoerd M. Bruijn, ‘The Loyal Dissident: N. A. Bernstein and the Double-Edged Sword of Stalinism’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 16, no. 1–2 (2007), p. 209.
24. N. A. Bernstein, ‘Biomekhanika i fiziologiya dvizheniy’ [‘Biomechanics and Physiology of Movement’], Izbrannye Psikhologicheskie Trudy [Selected Psychological Works], p. 462.
25. Alex Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology (MIT Press, 1984), p. 67.
27. Ibid., p. 65.
5: Exploring the mind
Vsevolod Pudovkin’s film Mechanics of the Brain: The Behaviour of Animals and Man popularised Ivan Pavlov’s physiology as a ‘materialist’ science.
A human being is not a satchel stuffed with reflexes; neither is it a hotel for reflexes that happen to drop in.1
Lev Vygotsky, 1925
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in 1849. Nine years later he fell off a wall. He recovered slowly, and spent much of the next two years with his godfather, the abbot of a monastery near his home town of Ryazan, 200 kilometres south-east of Moscow. The monastery’s simple, regular life and efficient bureaucracy had a clear influence over Pavlov’s later administration of his famous laboratories.
Pavlov left Ryazan for good at twenty-one, abandoning a religious career to join the faculty of physics and mathematics of the Military Medical Academy of St Petersburg. While he was there, student demonstrators harried, attacked and eventually destroyed the career of his adored mentor Ilya Tsion, a gentle man who was also an arch-conservative. This ‘wild episode’ left Pavlov alienated from his liberal colleagues and shaped his bleak view of the Russian character. ‘To say anything against the general mood was impossible,’ he recalled, speaking to the Women’s Medical Institute in the spring of 1918. ‘You were dragged down and all but labelled a spy.’2
Before the war, Pavlov led a life of great comfort: he was, after all, a member of the Academy of Sciences and a Nobel Prize winner. He enjoyed a spacious apartment with his wife and four children. He collected books and paintings. He spent summers at a dacha in Finland, where he swam, rode his bicycle, and socialised with other moneyed and educated holidaymakers.
Even Ivan Pavlov, a monarchist with two sons at the front, considered the tsar a dead duck, especially following the destruction of the Russian fleet off the coast of Korea in 1905. He scorned Nicholas II as an ‘idiot’ and ‘a degenerate’. He welcomed 1917, and came to call himself a liberal in solidarity with his colleagues, though his actual views were rather more conservative.
Pavlov was a choleric, pugnacious man, not above rapping students about the head with a beaker when they exasperated him. As far as he was concerned, ‘the only virtue, the only joy, the only attraction and passion, is the achievement of truth’. His wife Serafima, a gentle, profoundly religious woman, also tended to bang on about how worthwhile it was, supporting her godless husband in his pursuit of science. (If she talked about anything else Ivan would fall into a sulk and then stalk out of the room.)3
Pavlov spent the 1890s, his most productive decade, studying the physiology of digestion at the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine in St Petersburg. ‘Pavlov was not an eloquent orator,’ a former pupil recalled,
but his lectures were amazingly interesting … He spoke vividly and gesticulated expressively … It was a rule at his lectures that any student could raise his hand at any time and ask a question … It grieved him to hear none; in such cases he considered his lecture inadequate and would plead: ‘Questions, questions, I don’t hear questions.’4
Pavlov spent a long and illustrious career working out the role of the nervous system in bodily functions such as circulation and digestion. He deliberately omitted from his work any consideration of thought. He banned the word ‘learn’ from his laboratory and fined assistants who used any mental terms. By the turn of the century, however, thought was becoming increasingly hard for Pavlov simply to ignore.
*
The problem was straightforward. Beginning around the 1830s, a new experimental discipline had arisen. Psychology was supposed to explain the relationship between the senses, consciousness and normal behaviour. It was the science of the mind, and it was supposed to be an independent field. But in the course of half a century it had failed to explain anything very much, and had left a vacuum into which other disciplines were being drawn.
In 1874 the German philosopher Franz Brentano opened his major work Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint with a complaint about the unscientific clutter of ‘psychologies’ with which he had to deal. It was time, he said, to fuse them into one discipline. This was what his book was for. It failed.
William James’s Principles of Psychology of 1890 was altogether more iconoclastic: a self-mocking anatomy of a discipline which James doubted very much existed at all. He had arrived in Germany in 1867 as a young man, eager to be in at the birth of the new science, only to find his colleagues heaping up psychophysical measurements on top of each other in the ever more desperate hope that they would cohere to form a natural science of the mind. It was an approach, wrote James, that ‘could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored’.5
James had reached the conclusion that there was no ‘science of the mind’ – only the hope of one. The much touted ‘new psychology’, James wrote, was:
a string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions; a little classification and generalisation on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we have states of mind, and that our brain conditions them: but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced.6
Leon Trotsky, who had first-hand knowledge of psychoanalysis from his time in Vienna, wondered whether we could indeed arrive at knowledge of the sources of human poetry by studying the saliva of dogs,7 and nursed the idea that while Ivan Pavlov – Russia’s only living Nobelist and a national treasure – was approaching mind from underneath, by studying the smallest units (reflexes) from which mind was built, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was approaching mind from the top down, scraping away at consciousness to reveal the structures beneath:
Both Pavlov and Freud think that the bottom of the ‘soul’ is physiology. But Pavlov, like a diver, descends to the bottom and laboriously investigates the well from there upwards, while Freud stands over the well and with a penetrating gaze tries to pierce its ever-shifting and troubled waters and to make out or guess the shape of things down below.8
Given time and encouragement enough, might these great pioneers not meet in the middle, and create a truly scientific psychology?
Well – no. The problem has turned out to have as many dimensions as there are writers to write about them, but the chief problem in Pavlov’s day was practical. Physiology is the study of how living systems function, and this turns out to be virtually impossible unless you – literally, physically – cut mind out of the equation. The most famous and disturbing description of this problem came from the English physiologist Charles Sherrington, who tried to map the nerve circuits that controlled the scratching movement of a dog’s leg when its back is rubbed. Sherrington found himself embroiled in the most grotesque series of vivisectional horrors, creating ‘puppet animals’, mutilated living preparations, in order to solve quite simple physiological problems.
S
everal Russians who made important contributions to physiology found themselves banging their heads against the same wall.9 Ivan Sechenov was the first Russian physiologist of European standing, while at home he acquired an additional reputation as a radical and a nihilist when, in 1863, he published ‘Reflexes of the Brain’, a speculative essay arguing that all human behaviours are woven together out of reflex actions. The problem was how to map these reflexes in any meaningful way. By 1869, Sechenov was ready to quit. He lived to 1905 but spent his time studying gas absorption in blood, rarely returning to the grand but failed big ideas of his youth.
Vladimir Bekhterev enrolled at the Military Medical Academy in St Petersburg in 1873, three years after Ivan Pavlov, and graduated as a medical doctor in 1878. After a series of gruesome experiments that demonstrated how plastic the nervous system was, and how good it was at compensating for damage, Bekhterev threw up his hands and decided he did not actually need to map physical structures at all. Instead, he just stretched the idea of a ‘nervous reflex’ to cover whatever it was he wanted to talk about.10 Free from real, headache-inducing physiology, Bekhterev toyed with all kinds of approaches to mind, from parapsychology to Marxism. This sort of dilettantism is usually a bad idea, but for as long as the field of psychology refused to cohere, bringing every idea under one roof at least got people talking with each other. In 1907 Bekhterev founded his Psychoneurological Institute – an extraordinarily diverse, diffuse and confusing place that Bekhterev liked to think of as ‘a university of the human sciences’. (It was also one of the first co-educational colleges in Russia.) Its staff included the Darwinian zoopsychologist Vladimir Vagner, an educational psychologist specialising in personality studies, a liberal sociologist, a historian of culture, and a religious philosopher. Disagreements were welcomed, controversies thrashed out with courtesy and wit. It was a good place to work. But it produced no coherent psychology.
*
Then there was Pavlov.
Ivan Pavlov was a meticulous and brilliant surgeon who hated the sight of blood and took great care over his experimental animals. He had developed a technique of using surgical ‘windows’ or fistulas to study the functions of various organs, so that he didn’t have to resort to vivisection. This meant that he was confronted, day in day out, with the well-known phenomenon of ‘psychic secretion’ – the way dogs salivate not just when food is placed in their mouths but also when food is put before them – even when they simply hear the sounds of food being prepared.
He was perfectly well aware of this phenomenon, of course, but it was the kind of observation he rigorously excluded from his work, for the very good reason that his work could say nothing about it.
He was fifty-four, and on the verge of winning a Nobel Prize for decades of patient investigation of the nerves that regulate secretions in the digestive system, when he changed tack, startling a congress of physiologists in 1903 with his ‘conversion from purely physiological questions to the field of phenomena that are usually called psychic’.11
Quite why he stuck his neck out so far, so late in his career, had less to do with ambition and more to do with his desire not to revisit matters he considered closed. The great advance of Pavlov and his generation had been to explain bodily functions in terms of nerve signals. Prior to their arrival, physiology was still steeped in the humoral tradition, which held that the body’s workings were steered by the comings and goings of chemicals in the blood. Pavlov and his peers had taken great delight in demolishing this medieval idea.
In 1902, however, English physiologists William Bayliss and Ernest Starling discovered a hormone which appeared to control the release of juices secreted by the pancreas. According to Bayliss and Starling, the pancreas was not directed by nerve signals after all, but by a ‘humoral agent’. A whole string of ‘neo-humoral’ findings followed, threatening Pavlov’s tidy ‘nervism’.
So, rather than review ten years’ worth of experimental results, Pavlov chose to move into a fresh, less contested, less crowded area: psychology. And, in doing so, he attempted to become what Trotsky had made of him: a down-to-earth materialist whose dogged good sense would explain uncomfortably complex behaviours in simple, reductive ways.
Pavlov tried to explain mind in terms of reflexes. Simple ‘hard-wired’ reflexes were familiar to physiology students the world over. Pavlov concentrated instead on those reflexes that are acquired as one interacts with the world. He called these ‘conditional reflexes’, first because they depended upon external conditions, and second because he was still not entirely convinced of their existence. (The functional ambiguity of the word ‘conditional’ is the same in Russian as it is in English.)
A conditional reflex is acquired by repetition. In the laboratory, for example, a buzzer, light or mild electric shock (never, funnily enough, the handbell of popular myth) excites a dog’s ‘hearing analyser’ – a more-or-less hypothetical structure somewhere in the dog’s cerebral cortex. Then the dog is fed, and this excites a different locus, the ‘feeding centre’. Between the two points a temporary nervous link is established. After sufficient repetitions, the link is strong enough to set off a salivary reflex all on its own – but only for so long as feeding follows the bell. If food does not follow, then the conditional reflex is ‘inhibited’ and the salivatory reflex dies away.
‘Conditional reflexes’ were a way Pavlov could say things about mind while still generating repeatable, demonstrable effects in the laboratory. It was a fudge, enabling him to shoehorn his research into psychology while churning out dissertation topics that his junior staff could handle.
Not everyone was convinced. Though they had been friends for years, and had served on the same dissertation defence committee since 1895, Pavlov had a major falling-out with Vladimir Bekhterev when Bekhterev – eight years younger, and as a practising doctor more experienced in these matters – began to criticise Pavlov’s change of direction. The men argued bitterly about the functions of the brain. They stopped talking to one another and even refused to shake hands. Six years after Bekhterev’s death in 1927, Pavlov admitted to a friend: ‘Only now I feel how much I miss the arguments with Bekhterev.’12
*
Pavlov suffered his share of the tragedies visited on the country by its civil war. His son Viktor contracted typhus and died in Kiev while on a mysterious mission to White territory. During the Red Terror of 1918–20 the Bolshevik secret police repeatedly searched the Pavlovs’ home and briefly detained both Ivan and his eldest son, Vladimir. A third son, Vsevolod, was also a source of constant anxiety: declaring his intention to ‘fulfil my citizenly duty to the Homeland’, he had joined the White resistance. He did not return home until 1928, and ever afterwards the family remained on tenterhooks, fearful of his further arrest.
Throughout the 1920s the secret police followed Ivan Pavlov closely, and informers repeated his conversations in the lab, on the street and even with his family. The pressure took its toll. Pavlov’s temper grew worse and worse. He was even known to strike his subordinates – though if you had the bottle to shout back at him, you could usually bring him to his senses.
It was a wonder he stayed. As early as June 1920 he was writing to the highest governmental agency, the Council of People’s Commissars, for permission to ‘begin a correspondence (even a controlled one) with my foreign scientific friends and colleagues about finding a place for me outside of my homeland’. He felt isolated and, worse, he was broke: he held three academic posts and together the salaries weren’t enough to support his family.
I am compelled to work as a gardener in the appropriate season, which at my age is not always easy, and even to constantly play the role of a servant, of an assistant to my wife in the kitchen and maintenance of the apartment’s cleanliness, which, taken together, occupies a large, and even the best, part of the day. And despite this my wife and I eat very poorly, in both amount and quality; for years we have not seen white bread, for weeks and months at a time we have no milk or meat, feeding la
rgely upon black bread of poor quality, on millet, also of poor quality, and so forth, which naturally is causing us gradually to waste away and lose our strength. And this after a half-century of intense scientific work crowned by valuable scientific results recognised by the entire scientific world.13
Pavlov was laying it on a bit thick. He had august connections all over Europe and had he wanted to leave the USSR, no one at that time could have stopped him. He wanted signs of support at home much more than he wanted, or needed, permission to leave. He was advancing an argument already tried by the Academy of Sciences and other institutions: fund us, or we emigrate.
While he waited for an answer, Pavlov tested the ground by asking Anatoly Lunacharsky if he could have his medals back. They were returned to him straight away.
Contemplating Pavlov’s letter, Lenin found himself in a bind:
It doesn’t make any sense to let Pavlov go abroad … being a truthful person, in the event someone starts that sort of conversation, he won’t be able to stop himself speaking out against the Soviet regime and Communism in Russia. At the same time, this scientist constitutes such a big cultural asset, our keeping him in Russia by force, in conditions of material want, is unthinkable.14
Not long afterwards, Lenin’s hand was forced. In November 1920 the Swedish Red Cross wrote to him, suggesting that the Soviet government express its gratitude for all the aid given to Petrograd’s hospitals by allowing Pavlov to emigrate.
