Behaviour can be learned!

10 DECEMBER

Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov today received the Nobel Prize for his research into how the digestive system works. His experiments, which he carried out on dogs, have shown that nerve messages transmitted from the brain play a part in the digestion of our food. Scientists however are more excited by what Pavlov calls his ''conditioned reflex'' experiments, which may be of major importance for understanding how we learn. Pavlov has found that if a bell is runf each time a dog is fed it will eventually salivate when it hears the sound of a bell alone, even if no food is visible. If the same is true of humans, it suggests that kinds of behaviour can be learned, just like any other skill.