26 September: Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov was born on this date in 1849. He’s best known for classical conditioning and the Pavlovian response, famously ringing a bell and then giving a Dog food, and finding that eventually it will salivate at the sound of a bell alone. Here are some things you might not know about him:

1. Pavlov was born in Ryazan, Russia and was the eldest of eleven children. He learned to read by the time he was seven but didn’t go to school until he was 11 because he fell off a wall as a child and was badly injured.
2. His father was a Russian Orthodox priest and initially, Pavlov intended to follow in his footsteps and enrolled at a seminary. However, he left there to go to university in St Petersburg and study the sciences. One of his teachers was Dmitri Mendeleev, who devised the Periodic Table.
3. While his most famous experiment made him well known in the field of psychology, his field of study was actually physiology, in particular the digestive system. He won a Nobel prize in 1904 and was the first Russian Nobel laureate. However, it wasn’t for classical conditioning. It was for performing an operation on a dog so he could observe its digestive system in action.
4. There’s some doubt as to whether he ever used bells in his conditioning experiments at all. His writings mention electric shocks, whistles, metronomes, tuning forks, and a range of visual stimuli rather than bells.
5. Even the term “conditioned response” wasn’t the term Pavlov used. He called it the “conditional response” but when his work was translated from the original Russian, a mistranslation gave us the word we use today.
6. He married Seraphima, known as Sara for short, in 1881. At that time, scientists in Russia weren’t paid very much so they often had to live apart as they couldn’t afford a place of their own. Often the friends they stayed with could only accommodate one of them. They had four children which survived to adulthood. All four had names beginning with V – Vladimir, Victor, Vsevolod, and Vera. A fifth child, Mirchik, had died as an infant.
7. To make money, Pavlov used to sell one of the products of his work – canine gastric juice. He got one of his assistants to collect it and sold thousands of containers of it as a cure for indigestion.
8. He had an anger management problem. Ever since he was a child, his mood could suddenly change and he’d have an angry outburst. Sadly, he often took his bad moods out on the poor dogs in his lab. Pavlov himself described his angry outbursts as “morbid, spontaneous paroxysms.”
9. A scientist to the last, he asked one of his students to sit by his bed as he was dying of pneumonia at the age of 86, and record the process of his dying.
10. He has an Asteroid (1007 Pawlowia), and a crater on the Moon named after him.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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