| The founder of Russian physiology, Sechenov was mentor to Ivan Pavlov and instrumental in bringing psychology and
science together. He was born in the village that is now Sechenovo, and first became a military engineer before studying
medicine, in which he completed his degree at Moscow University in 1856. He later studied in the laboratories of Johannes Müller and Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1862, while working in the laboratory of Claude Bernard, Sechenov discovered the inhibition of spinal reflexes by the central nervous system. Although simple spinal reflexes could involve invariable connections between receptors and effectors via the spinal cord, he found that the reflexes were often modified by influences from the brain. This discovery, and his early work on feedback control of movement, led to his popular text Reflexes of the brain. Renewed interest in Sechenov's work led to the reprinting of that book in English in 1965. Sechenov held that behavior and even consciousness were comprised of reflexes. He firmly believed that through physiological study of reflexes the major questions of psychology could be answered—that psychology. properly
studied, was the domain of physiologists, not of philosophers. His belief in the reflex as the "atom" of behavior and in physiology as the means of studying psychology is obvious in the work of his students, Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Bekhterev. |
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