Restoring a Master’s Voice

The New York Times:

Training a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell would have seemed pretty stupid to Ivan Pavlov. He was after much bigger things.

Using instruments like metronomes and harmoniums, he demonstrated that a dog could make astonishingly fine discriminations — distinguishing between a rhythm of 96 and 104 beats a minute or an ascending and a descending musical scale. But what he really wanted to know was what his animals were thinking. His dream was a grand theory of the mind.

He couldn’t put his subjects on a couch like his colleague Freud and ask them to free-associate, so he gauged their reactions to a variety of stimuli, meticulously counting their “psychic secretions,” those droplets of drool.

He knew he was pricking at the skin of something deeper. “It would be stupid,” he said, “to reject the subjective world.”

…

“The truth is that we are still at a loss to explain how the brain does all but the most elementary things,” Gary Marcus, a New York University psychologist who specializes in language and music, wrote in a new collection of essays, “The Future of the Brain.” “We simply do not understand how the pieces fit together.”

For Pavlov, the pieces — the atoms — were the simplest measurable associations. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response. By weaving together webs of these connections, he hoped to capture the ineffable.

Read the whole story: The New York Times