The footage comes from the film "The Mechanics of the Brain" (1926). There is a short wikipedia page about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanics_of_the_Brain. One used to be able to purchase copies of it from the Center for the History of Psychology in Akron, though I don't known if that is still the case.
The film is pretty well known among historians of psychology. It isn't something that Scientology discovered that was being suppressed, or something. Scientology, of course, uses bits of it in their ongoing "war" on psychiatry and psychology. Pavlov, however, belonged to neither discipline. He was a physiologist and disliked being associated with psychology. It is interesting, therefore, that Scientology doesn't attack physiology on this basis. But that isn't their agenda. Pavlov's work was appropriated by Yerkes and Watson around 1910 (see e.g., http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Yerkes/pavlov.htm). The two scenes in the film with the children are disturbing, to be sure. I hesitate to show the whole film in my classes for this reason, though I have from time to time (with lots of advance warning). My guess is that the two boys came from an orphanage, of which there would have been many in the years immediately after World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the ensuing civil war. If you watch the film as a whole, you see that the director (Vsevolod Pudovkin) was making a case for the evolutionary continuity of nervous function. It begins with experiments on frogs and works its way up the "phylogenetic scale," ultimately all the way to humans -- the two boys. There are many scenes of the classic dog experiments, also, but they represent just one point along the continuum. As I recall, the film made its way first to Italy. After WWII, it was taken by a professor to Wayne State University in Detroit, which is where the English titles were added. Regards, Chris --- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada [email protected] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ========================= On 2014-01-14, at 7:19 PM, Lisa Hager wrote: > > > > I saw some film footage about Pavlov's experiments on children while I was > watching a propaganda piece published by the Church of Scientology (The Age > of Fear). I wanted to see what types of claims the scientologists were making > and so I looked further into the claims about Pavlov. I was disappointed to > find out that the scientologists were right about Pavlov. He did create > salivary fistulae in children to study their salivary responses. No surprise > that he replicated the results he found with dogs. The BBC series The Brain: > A Secret History has some of this footage. I found the first episode of the > 2011 series on vimeo. The Pavlov footage is about 5 or 6 minutes in > http://vimeo.com/18608588. I found it disturbing to watch and I wondered if > others were familiar with this research. > > > Lisa D. Hager, Ph.D. > Professor of Psychology > Chair, Social Sciences Division > Spring Hill College > 4000 Dauphin St. > Mobile, AL 36608 > (251)380-3055 > [email protected] > > > > --- > > You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. > > To unsubscribe click here: > http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=430248.781165b5ef80a3cd2b14721caf62bd92&n=T&l=tips&o=32734 > > (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) > > or send a blank email to > leave-32734-430248.781165b5ef80a3cd2b14721caf62b...@fsulist.frostburg.edu > > > --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=32741 or send a blank email to leave-32741-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
