During the World War II, the Germans blockaded Leningrad for two and a half years in an attempt to starve the population into submission. The 880-day Siege of Leningrad forced terrible privations and suffering on people. First they ate all the zoo animals, then all the stray dogs, and then all the pet dogs. By the end of 1942, however, those good times were over. Things grew desperate. To make the bread ration of 125 grams (4.4 ounces) per person per day go further, the besieged citizens mixed it with sawdust. Soon people were making soup from shoe leather, boiled grass, acorns and twigs. And there were rumours of the cannibalisation of the recently deceased.
One day, during the cold hard January of 1943, Rita Kitanova, a researcher from the Institute of Experimental Medicine revealed to a select group of friends that she had been holding out on them. She had the keys to a secret store of livestock: Pavlov’s dogs.
At first her friends didn’t believe her. If there were any dogs still alive in this city, they would have heard them bark. No-one had heard a dog bark in Leningrad for over a year. If Pavlov’s dogs were still alive, then why had no-one ever heard them bark. Pavlov’s dogs were never heard to bark, Rita Kitanova replied, because they were kept inside the Tower of Silence, the soundproofed, three-story research facility designed by Pavlov to prevent outside noises contaminating his experimental results. ‘The windows were covered with extra-thick glass and the rooms had double-steel doors that formed an airtight seal when closed.’* Even inside the Institute building itself, Rita Kitanova explained, you still couldn’t hear the dogs bark, not until you were actually within the inner sanctum of the Tower of Silence itself.
* Duane and Sydney Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology, 2012.
Her small circle of friends were overjoyed. For the first time in over a year they were going to eat fresh meat. They decided to enjoy this rare meal in style. With frying pans hidden under thick winter coats they crunched over sludge and snow to Pavlov’s laboratory on the banks of the River Neva. In their pockets were secreted whatever condiments they had managed to find. Rita Kitanova had a dried bulb of garlic in her glove, a friend’s waistcoat pocket hid a withered and crumbly parsley root, another friend had pepper in her hat band and linen napkins stolen from the derelict kitchen of the famous Palkin restaurant.
When they entered the Tower of Silence, the smell of live animal and thoughts of freshly cooked meat were overpowering. They began drooling at the mouth. The dogs gave them a look as if to say: ‘You’re supposed to wait for the bell’.
Ivan Pavlov didn’t work with just any dog. A very long process was required before he selected Avgust, Pingel, Postrel, Toy, Bes, Milord, Max, Vampire and Umnitsa. Most dogs didn’t want to know. They resisted programming in all sorts of ways. When some dogs had the rubber tube slotted into the surgical incision cut into their cheek, they became so dry-mouthed with fear that Pavlov’s experiment was the one time in their whole lives that they never salivated at the thought of food. Some dogs would only work with one particular researcher, but no-one else, and when that favourite researcher left, they became listless and uncooperative. Sensory deprivation made many dogs too depressed to work. No runaround, no contact sniffing of other dogs, in fact precious little in the way of smell at all. For a dog having nothing to smell is like being kept in a dark room, but Pavlov was keen to rule out any possibility that a stray smell might elicit pre-emptive salivation in the dogs before the dinner bell was rung. To this end he concocted a sterile odourless environment. Alas, the dogs had not read their Eagleman and so weren’t to know that they invented smells within their own brains, and so an odourless cell was no deprivation whatsoever. These were less enlightened times, and many dogs simply grew too unhappy to work with.
A very long selection process was needed before a small sub-set of dogs could be found to fit Pavlov’s experimental design. Given such a long selection process a conscientious scientist might wonder whether what was being measured had anything to do with what is found in the real world. After all, when Sir Francis Bacon advanced the empirical method, did he have in mind the construction of an artificial set-up designed to yield pleasingly quantifiable results?
Now, retreating to a Tower of Silence to study so boisterous an animal as a dog may seem self-defeating, rather like retreating to an ivory tower to study elephant conservation, but Pavlov designed the three-story building with the fairy-tale name after the outside world came crashing in one day and almost destroyed his life’s work. On 23 September 1924, heavy rains caused the River Neva to burst its banks and flood Pavlov’s Institute of Experimental Medicine, located right on the river bank. Pavlov’s biographer Daniel Todes vividly describes how ‘the rescuers found the animals’ cages filling rapidly with water. Pressed upward toward the wire ceilings, the dogs strained to keep their noses above water’.
The cage doors were underwater. Each rescuer grabbed a dog, and dived down into the dirty floodwater, swam through the submerged door to surface in the corridor, they and the dogs gasping for air. Unlike the rescuers however, the terrified dogs didn’t know why their heads were being dragged under the water, and fought against the keepers who they believed were trying to drown them.
Every last dog was saved, but many were never the same again. The flood left in its wake, not just tide marks on the wall, but an ornery dog pack no longer willing to play the game. Many dogs – including star pupil Avgust – no longer salivated when the bell was rung.
Had the flood simply wiped their conditional reflexes in the same way that a shock snaps someone out of hypnosis? Or was the cause of Avgust’s newly acquired disobedience his loss of trust in his handlers? Pavlov wasn’t sure either way. All he knew was that after the flood Avgust and other dogs reacted differently to the bell. Instead of salivating, Avgust now thrashed his head this way and that, trying to escape the wooden stand to which he was tied. Other times the bell sent him into a catatonic trance.
Before the flood, Ivan Pavlov considered the great significance of his world famous dog experiments to be the creation of an artificial link between the ‘cortical and the sub-cortical’, korkovyi i podkorkovyi. He had hacked through the impenetrable jungle that divides conscious from subconscious, psychology from physiology, mind from matter. *
* In Pavlov’s defence, I should say that he is not quite the rigid determinist he is painted. The heavier tones of this portrait, in fact, come from a simple mistranslation. Pavlov’s original idea of conditional – uslovnyy – reflex, ie. contingent upon an earlier stage of the reflex arc, was mistranslated into English as conditioned – uboslovlennyy – reflex, ie. determined, hard-wired. However slovenly this mistranslation, it still marks only a change in emphasis, a change of degree not kind.
Pavlov’s fame rests on the myth that he tapped the dogs’ subconscious like you would tap a Malaysian rubber tree. A small incision and then he waits for the white subcortical sap to drip into the cup, drop by drop. With these cups of subcortical latex, Pavlov showed, he believed, that from now on behaviour could be modified, psychology shaped to fit requirements. Goodbye to all those vague notions so beloved by previous tender-minded generations: the innate, the essential, the intrinsic. Now came the era of psychological reconstruction, rebuilding the brain. All these ringing declarations, all these magnificent results, all the bold project of remaking organisms in a planned and scientific way, all this internationally renowned science depended, however, on banishing the outside world.
The floodwaters, then, broke much more than the lab’s riverside windows. They also burst Pavlov’s experimental bubble, and raised a terrible question: were these results only ever applicable in the contrived conditions of the Institute of Experimental Medicine, but not in the real word?
Sure, the results were sound as far as they went. Yes, with a bit of training and a bell, input x will give you output y. But even so limited a result, the flood showed, turned out to depend on a broad array of factors, including bonds of trust and reciprocity built up between dog and handler, and, as we saw earlier, the deselection of unhappy, disobedient or stir-crazy dogs in favour of especially biddable dogs.
When the river washed away every last cup of canine saliva, an open-minded scientist might have glimpsed, among the wreckage, an epistemological challenge. If dogs were machines, could they now be programmed to forget their trauma? If the terror of drowning had wiped one set of reflex circuits clean, would it now be possible to put a new set of reflexes in? Could Avgust learn to associate a softly ticking metronome with feelings of immense assurance? Could an electric buzzer or a flashing light induce the removal of anxiety and fear in a traumatised hound? But Pavlov didn’t think like that. He was the sort of man for whom the right response to the outside world bursting your bubble was to build a bigger, more impregnable bubble. The following year, 1925, construction began on the Tower of Silence.
To prevent contamination from the outside world is properly a central concern in all laboratory design, part of a scrupulous attempt to ensure controlled laboratory conditions for scientifically repeatable experimentation. But with Pavlov it goes beyond that. His Tower of Silence, I suggest, has both an ideological and a psychological cause. Ideologically, once you have committed yourself to the doctrine that animals are machines, you will have to build some sort of shed for these faultless contraptions or else they will start behaving like animals. And that’s no good to anyone.
Psychologically, we all build Towers of Silence to which we retreat when everything gets a bit too much, but Pavlov was never one to hold with that sort of touchy-feely mumbo-jumbo. Not only did he ban the use of psychological terms in his laboratory, he used to fine his researchers for using them.
What are we to make of this? If we accept him at his own estimation, the banning of psychology from the lab was done for pedagogical purposes, to instruct his research assistants in the proper application of Conway Lloyd Morgan’s (1952–1936) law for the interpretation of animal behaviour. Morgan’s Canon states that:
In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as one that stands lower in the psychological scale.*
* C. Lloyd Morgan, Introduction to Comparative Psychology, 1894.
Pavlov insisted that a physiological explanation, unlike a psychological one, was objectively measurable, and for that reason and that reason alone he would forbid any mention of any psychological terms from being used in his hearing. But we need not take him at his word. There may be other reasons why a man who built a Tower of Silence would be irritated on hearing colleagues mutter phrases such as ‘sublimation’, ‘defence mechanism’, ‘projection’, ‘transference’, ‘loony’ and ‘nutjob’.
Donald O. Hebb gives another example of Pavlov retreating to a metaphorical Tower of Silence: ‘Apparently, Pavlov isolated himself from the contemporary literature, and his theory took no account of psychological discussions after 1900.’ This sort of behaviour comes at a cost, as Hebb makes clear: ‘[Pavlov’s] theory has not been rejected because it is too physiological, but because it doesn’t agree with experiment.’*
* D. O. Hebb, The Organization of Behaviour,1949.
You can contrast Pavlov’s attempt to insulate his dogs from the outside world with Rosenzweig’s account of failing to get a new set of results by introducing indoor lab rats to the outdoor Field Station at Berkeley.
We tried … to ask how our enriched laboratory environment might compare with the natural environment … Groups of a dozen male laboratory rats thrived in the outdoor setting and … dug burrows, something their ancestors had not been able to do for more than 100 generations … Unfortunately, however, in the outdoor setting the rats became too savage to handle, so we were unable to conduct behavioural tests with them.
This cheerful admission of defeat seems to me to have more of the authentic ring of science to it than Pavlovian scientism. I know that being bitten on the finger by a feral rat does not compare to having your entire lab flooded, but Rosenzweig’s free and open acknowledgement of what he hasn’t been able to show is made possible by the robustness and significance of what he has been able to show. If your hypothesis is sound, then even when experiments go wrong they can still offer powerfully corroborative data. In post mortem, the brains of these feral rats showed greater cortical development than any of the indoor lab rats, no matter how complex their environment:
This indicates that even the enriched laboratory environment is indeed impoverished in comparison with a natural environment.
Pavlov’s results were less robust which left him less able to entertain the possibility that the stultifying kennel conditions stunted the dogs’ responses to the extent that experimental inference was unreliable.
The bad behaviour of Pavlov’s dogs, their refusal to cooperate after the flood, is very good news for us all. Just as the Tower of Silence once did for dogs, so the noisy tunnel of fMRI is supposed to show that we are crude input-output machines. Where Pavlov had rubber measuring cups to catch drops of saliva, brain scans now catch colourful blobs of love, hate, joy, sorrow and other delusions. And so, a century on, we have reason to be immensely cheered by Pavlov’s disobedient dogs, Avgust, Pingel, Postrel, Toy, Bes, Milord, Max, Vampire and Umnitsa, which means ‘clever fellow.’