Ivan Pavlov was born in 1849 in the village of Ryazan. He was originally educated at church school and theological seminary in his village. However inspired by the progressive ideas of D. I. Pisarev, and I. M. Sechenov, the father of Russian physiology, Pavlov decided to quit the seminary and devote his life to science. Physiology quickly became his passion, and in his first course on the subject Pavlov and a fellow student produced a work on the physiology of pancreatic nerves, which he was awarded for.
In 1883, Pavlov presented his doctoral thesis on the "centrifugal nerves of the heart", and this paper was the foundation of the principles of the trophic function of the nervous system. The trophic function is responsible for nutrition of tissues and organs, and maintaining homeostasis.
Most notable of Pavlov's achievements were his dog experiments that took place between 1890 and 1900 at the Institute of Experimental Medicine. His experiments started as a study of the physiology of digestion, however Pavlov soon noticed that dogs were salivating without the presence of food whenever anyone with a white coat came into the room. The dogs were normally fed by people in white coats, so he came up with the bell experiment to see if he could get the dogs to salivate without food (the unconditioned stimulus) by using another, neutral, stimulus (the bell) to condition them. He knew the dogs salivated in the presence of food, so he would ring a bell every time the dogs were fed, conditioning them to associate the bell with food. By the end of the experiment, the dogs would salivate when a bell was rang, with or without food present. This type of associative conditioning became known as classical conditioning and laid the foundation for many psychological theories of learning and training.
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