The Truth About Pavlov’s Dogs Is Pretty Disturbing, Esther Inglis-Arkell, io9, June 17, 2014

When did Pavlov’s dogs start salivating? When they heard a bell, you say? Au contraire. Pavlov’s dogs started salivating when they saw lab coats. Workers at a lab that studied digestion noticed that the dogs used in the experiments were drooling for seemingly no reason at all.

It was only Ivan Pavlov, a scientist working at the lab, who made the connection between the lab coats and the drool. The dogs, Pavlov reasoned, knew that they were soon going to be fed whenever they saw a lab coat. What intrigued Pavlov was the fact that a physical response could be produced solely by way of a mental association. The dogs couldn’t drool on command consciously, but they could be trained to do so just the same.

Agriculture isn’t Natural, Keith Kloor, Collide-A-Scape, June 12, 2014 Continue reading →