Ivan Pavlov is portrayed as a principled person who does what he has passion. At his young age, he was introduced to religion school and later a theological seminar to follow the steps of his father who was a village priest (Fields, 2006). However, since this was not part of his passion, at 21 years, he abandoned religious studies following the inspiration of D. I. Pisarev an eminent Russian literary critic and I. M. Sechenov who was the father of Russian physiology (Todes, 2000). He then enrolled a mathematics and physics faculty and took a course in natural science. In this field, he had passion and felt inspired. This courage of abandoning his father’s life and following his heart was one of the major reasons that made me select him. Further,
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In science, he is able to prove possibility of various principles that were seen as mere imaginations ("Ivan Pavlov - Biography, Books and Theories", 2017). For instance, his research on the digestion processes of dogs led to the development of Classical Conditioning. His experiments mostly involved studying reflexes that cause salivation in dogs. Pavlov noticed that when the dogs were presented with food, they would salivate as expected. He then introduced a bell, where the bell would be rung every time the food was presented to the dogs. Soon, the dogs began to associate the sound of the bell with food and would begin salivating whenever the bell was rung. Pavlov concluded that the association of the presentation of food with the sound of the bell triggered a conditioned response. Pavlov became the first person to study the conditioning behavior paving way for other psychologists such as John Watson who conducted a conditioning experiment on humans based on Pavlov’s observations. The idea of conditioning was to pair a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus and eventually the subject would learn to associate the two. After sometime, the neutral stimulus alone would trigger the same response as unconditioned stimulus. In other words, a new behavior is acquired by a subject through the process of association (Pavlov & Gantt,
In science, he is able to prove possibility of various principles that were seen as mere imaginations ("Ivan Pavlov - Biography, Books and Theories", 2017). For instance, his research on the digestion processes of dogs led to the development of Classical Conditioning. His experiments mostly involved studying reflexes that cause salivation in dogs. Pavlov noticed that when the dogs were presented with food, they would salivate as expected. He then introduced a bell, where the bell would be rung every time the food was presented to the dogs. Soon, the dogs began to associate the sound of the bell with food and would begin salivating whenever the bell was rung. Pavlov concluded that the association of the presentation of food with the sound of the bell triggered a conditioned response. Pavlov became the first person to study the conditioning behavior paving way for other psychologists such as John Watson who conducted a conditioning experiment on humans based on Pavlov’s observations. The idea of conditioning was to pair a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus and eventually the subject would learn to associate the two. After sometime, the neutral stimulus alone would trigger the same response as unconditioned stimulus. In other words, a new behavior is acquired by a subject through the process of association (Pavlov & Gantt,