Word: pavlovian
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...suggested more than 40 years ago by British Obstetrician Grantly Dick Read, who taught that bearing children is not necessarily painful, that pain comes only because of fear, which may interfere with contractions of uterine muscles that open the womb and push the child out through the birth canal. Pavlovian psychologists in Soviet Russia took Dick Read's idea one step farther. Both fear and pain, they reasoned, could be overcome by conditioning. During the 1940s, Soviet doctors began educating mothers to be unafraid of childbirth, and by 1951 hospitals in Moscow, Kharkov and Leningrad all used the natural...
...offers its customers nothing more than hour after hour of phonograph records and a chance to dance where there is no room to breathe. Having such creatures as null Sagan, Porfirio Rubirosa and Yves Saint-Laurent under his electrified baton was excuse enough for the Pavlovian power Warfield felt, but like all pioneer artists, he was misunderstood in his time. Last week, for all his genius, he was fired on the implied charge that he was turning the Princesse into a laboratory for psy-chomusical research; he had become a power-crazed, prima donna player of the phonograph...
Predictably, Mississippi's Democratic Senator James 0. Eastland said that the report reeked of "rankest falsehood." But even less Pavlovian officials thought the commission went overboard. The President himself pointed out that he has no general authority to hold back federal funds, since by law only Congress can say what strings are attached to what money. Broader presidential powers "would probably be unwise," he said...
...Psychologist James V. McConnell, 36, turned to flatworms (Planaria), regarded as the most primitive creatures capable of true "learning." In 150 to 250 lessons, the worms learned that the flashing on of an electric light meant that they should contract and brace themselves for an electric shock. With this Pavlovian conditional reflex, high-IQ flatworms heeded the light warning and contracted 23 times...
...Soviet education is "men and women of noble spirit and lofty ideals who will serve their people selflessly." But Russian schools do not inevitably produce bright-eyedc "builders of Communist society"-not in a land of war orphans and working mothers. Three years ago Nikita Khrushchev ordered a Pavlovian solution: boarding schools in which "engineers of the soul" could hatch a new elite under ideal laboratory conditions. By last week Russia had more than 500 such new schools, with an enrollment of 360,000 students. "The time is not far off," Khrushchev has gloated, "when all our children will...