Synopsis
Excerpt
When he was 80 years old, Ivan Pavlov plucked an old book off the library shelf, opened it immediately to page 230, and displayed it sentimentally to a friend. The book was George Lewes's The Physiology of Common Life, and the page showed a diagram of an animal's internal organs. [When in my very young days I read this book in a Russian translation,] Pavlov recalled, [I was greatly intrigued by this picture. I asked myself: How does such a complicated system work?]
]How does such a complicated system work?] That was the question that Ivan Pavlov asked about animals, including humans, throughout his life. How does the heart work, how does the digestive system work, and, finally, how does the brain work? For Pavlov, animals were wonderful and infinitely complex machines that somehow worked precisely as they must in order to survive. The heart surpassed any artificial machine in its ability to pump blood (even regulating its own speed and force) for decades without resting, the stomach adjusted to pour just the right combination of gastric juices on any meal so it could be efficiently digested, and the brain somehow turned the sight of a . . .