Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Ivan Petrovic Pavlov: their parallel scientific lives, schools and nobel prizes

Abstract

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was not only a great scientist but he was also a dedicated teacher who managed to create his own School in Spain. Cajal was active at the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century, a period in which Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, another great contemporary scientist, also established a strong School in Russia. While these two acclaimed scientists shared a similar vision on science, a view they also conveyed to their disciples, they applied quite distinct criteria in the way they dealt with their followers. Interestingly, despite the geographic and idiomatic barriers that had to be overcome, the paths of these two great figures of XX century science crossed at least three times. First when they competed for the City of Moscow Prize, second when they both attended the “Congreso Internacional de Medicina de Madrid” (Medicine International Congress in Madrid) in 1903 and finally, they competed on four consecutive occasions for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Here we discuss their scientific vision, their different attitudes in the interaction with disciples and the distinct circumstances in which their paths crossed.

Sound check, stage design and screen plot – how to increase the comparability of fear conditioning and fear extinction experiments

“…Moreover, they may cause learning processes which enable anticipatory responses for cases when a threatening situation is again encountered. Ivan P. Pavlov (1849–1936) (Rozo and Rodriguez-Moreno 2015 ) has developed a general theoretical framework for stimulus–stimulus associations (even though not in the context of fear) and coined the technical terms which are still in use today and at the basis of our understanding of those processes (Pavlov 1927 ). 1 A PubMed search with the keywords “fear conditioning” revealed more than 7000 publications since 2000 with a steady increase until today.…”

Psicología y Pedagogía en Cuba: La formación psicológica como sustento teórico de la obra científico-pedagógica de Norma Rosalía Cárdenas Morejón (1950-2011)

“…El legado de su escuela sigue vivo aún en Rusia y no sólo ha impactado el campo de la psicofisiología sino de la psicología experimental, la psicoterapia, etc. (Rozo & Rodríguez-Moreno, 2015. Citado por Rozo y Pérez-Acosta, 2/5/2020, s/p) De él conoció el estudio del reflejo condicionado, luego condicionamiento pavloviano y su caracterización; el principio del condicionamiento pavloviano clásico o fórmula E-R (incluye la conducta global de los animales situados en los tramos inferiores de la escala evolutiva y parte de la conducta de los animales superiores incluido el hombre); los impulsos científicos a los estudios sobre los mecanismos de aprendizaje, de la formación de hábitos y la motivación; la teoría explicativa del problema del sueño; experimentos de nuevos "estados mentales" anormales en animales (neurosis).…”

Cajal, the neuronal theory and the idea of brain plasticity

“…Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) discoveries have been incorporated into the scientific knowledge of our time. In previous articles we have highlighted the importance of some aspects of his work ( Rozo and Rodríguez-Moreno, 2014 , 2015a , b ; Rozo et al, 2017 ; Mateos-Aparicio and Rodríguez-Moreno, 2019 ; Rozo et al, 2022 ). Here we briefly introduce Cajal’s general influence in Neuroscience and highlight Cajal’s neuronal theory and the origin of the idea of brain and neuronal plasticity.…”