Basic Methodological Positions of The Physiology of Movements

Journal of Russian & East European Psychology
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Basic Methodological Positions of the Physiology

of Movements
N.A. BERNSTEIN
To cite this article: N.A. BERNSTEIN (2006) Basic Methodological Positions of the Physiology of
Movements, Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 44:2, 12-32
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-0405440201
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Basic Methodological Positions

of the Physiology of Movements
Up to now the physiology of movements in general, and the physiology

of the motor acts of man in particular, have been among the most back-
ward and least developed branches of physiology. This is all the stranger
in view of the fact that interest in this indisputably important and practi-
cally significant field has been manifest since very distant times
(Leonardo da Vinci in the sixteenth century, Borelli in the eighteenth),
each time leading only to a talented but brief outburst that left behind
neither a scientific school nor a research tradition. In the nineteenth cen-
tury we have in this field, in the West, the Weber brothers’ thoughtful
but primitive observations, made without instruments, Marei’s very rich
collection of chronophotographic documents, cast aside without any
analysis, and the meticulous, purely German six-volume work of Braune
and Fischer on three double steps of a laboratory assistant, their sole
experimental subject. The entire foreign literature of the current century
has contributed nothing new here.
Nineteenth-century Russian science yielded much more that is of fun-
damental importance to the theory of movements. Here it is necessary
to recall with respect the detailed research in dynamic anatomy of the
creator of the Russian science of physical education, P.F. Lesgaft, but to
assign first place to the brilliant spark of scientific foresight, the book
English translation © 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2004
Smysl. “Osnovnye metodologicheskie pozitsii fiziologii dvizhenii,” in Nikolai
Bernshtein: ot refleksa k modeli budushchego, ed. I.M. Feigenberg (Moscow: Smysl,
2004), pp. 448–80.
Translated by Stephen D. Shenfield.
12
01basic method.pmd 12 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

MARCH–APRIL 2006 13
Reflexes of the Brain [Refleksy golovnogo mozga], written by the young

I.M. Sechenov and hitherto read by all.
In his declining years, at the beginning of our century, Sechenov put
out a small book devoted especially to the physiology of movements—
Essay on the Working Movements of Man [Ocherk rabochikh dvizhenii
cheloveka]. This essay, marked by the subtly observant and thoughtful
qualities that always distinguished the “father of Russian physiology,”
is read even today with interest and profit. However, it comprises merely
a chance episode in the life of Sechenov himself, who never specially

concerned himself with movements.
Such neglect of the physiology of the functions of movement, both in
foreign and in Russian science, is all the more difficult to explain in
view of the fact that questions parallel to it—the physiology of the func-
tions of perception, that is, of the working of the sense organs—have
been the object of more than a century of uninterrupted and enormously
successful effort and have generated a vast scientific literature. We are
fully entitled to say this both of the biophysics of the sense organs, estab-
lished by Helmholtz and developed by Nernst and von Lerch and in our
country by Lazarev, Kravkov, Rzhevkin, and others, and of their psycho-
physiology (Fechner, Wundt, and in Russia—Teplov, Grashchenkov,
Kekcheev, and others). The practical applications of this branch of physi-
ology that arose in this period are also extensive and multifaceted.
Suppose that the earth were visited by a rational being from another
planet who had never before seen a human, and that in order to learn
about us he took in his hands one of the contemporary textbooks on the
physiology of man. He would, probably, acquire an extremely strange
conception of us. Before him would appear the image of an organism of
unusual harmony and perfection and of immense complexity. With strik-
ing precision of mutual regulation, this organism accomplishes the as-
similation of food and oxygen, the splendidly organized exchange of
substances, the most delicate automatic regulation of blood circulation,
internal secretion, excretion, blood formation, the action of protective
and antimicrobial mechanisms. And, finally, the nervous system, ramified
everywhere and extending its coordinating power (as the Soviet scientist
Academician K.M. Bykov recently brilliantly demonstrated) to all func-
tions without exception of the organism’s internal systems. But—this
wonderfully equipped creation has no movements! The extraterrestrial
visitor would have to imagine a human either lying immobile on a bed
or, perhaps, hanging equally immobile somewhere in interstellar space,

far from any external forces and objects, even beyond the range of a
gravitational field. What then, he may ask, is all this delicate regulation
of organs for?
Enough has been written of the practical and applied importance of
the science of man’s movements, and there is hardly any need now for
anyone to establish the significance of this field. In the present article, I
shall examine the basic methodological platform of this young branch
of Soviet physiology. On the way I shall make an attempt to show how
the underdevelopment of such a significant field of physiology has caused,

in addition to the direct loss concerning knowledge of this subject, even
greater methodological distortions and errors of interpretation in a whole
series of other fields of physiology that are connected organically and
inextricably with the motor functions—both in animals and in man.
Neglect of the physiology of motor acts throughout the history of
general physiology and of the physiology of man has prevented investi-
gators from focusing their attention on a whole series of very important
biological laws and relationships.
Of all the forms of interaction of the living being with the world
around it, movements have a special, exceptional significance for it.
Indeed, by means of movements the living being not only takes part in
the course of phenomena of the surrounding world, but also, in goal-
directed fashion, itself produces phenomena in the outer world. It is
precisely movements, motor acts that in the overwhelming majority of
cases comprise the means by which the living being struggles for its
safety, for its needs, for everything that is vitally necessary for it. By
means of movements it strives to overcome the aggregate action of the
external environment in the direction that conforms to its needs. Thus,
motor acts are one of the clearest manifestations of the struggle for
existence in the animal world. Naturally, without studying these mo-
tor acts physiologists were unable to perceive and appropriately ap-
praise a whole series of facts of primary importance. Below I shall
name the main facts of this kind.
It has been very long established by physiology (C. Bell, 1820s) that
all peripheral nerves are clearly divided into two classes in accordance
with the direction in which neural impulses flow along them. The nerves
that transmit neural discharges from the periphery of the body to the
brain are called centripetal or afferent nerves; those that act in the oppo-
site direction and put into effect all active manifestations of the brain are
called centrifugal or efferent nerves.

Of all the efferent manifestations of the organism’s activity, the at-

tention of physiology was focused constantly on very elementary and
transient phenomena—for the greater part, moreover, of little biological
importance. These were either manifestations of the activity of external
glands (for example, the secretion of saliva) or—if consideration was
given to movements—brief, fragmentary body movements like the pull-
ing back of an animal’s paw due to painful irritation of the skin. Obser-
vation of such elementary efferent processes established precisely that
in all of them the perceptual or afferent function necessarily takes part

in the role of a triggering signal for each of them. The elementary reac-
tions described, switched on or set in motion by one or another afferent
signal and producing one of the named forms of elementary response,
came to be called reflexes. The typical pathway of the neural impulse in
them—from the periphery to the brain, thence back to the periphery, to a
muscle or gland—was designated, figuratively and quite legitimately, a
reflex arc.
Indeed, in such fragmentary acts as the defensive reflex of pulling
back in pain the role of the perceptual function is confined to the trans-
mission of the triggering signal. However, attentive experimental study
of diverse motor acts of more complex construction and greater signifi-
cance has shown that perception through the sense organs, creating in
the brain a true reflection of the outer world, plays a most important role
throughout the motor act, however long it may last. This role, which has
nothing in common with the triggering role mentioned above, wholly
slipped the attention of physiology, which only in recent years has man-
aged to notice and appropriately appraise it. The nature of this basic role
of the perceptual function in movement and the reason why it was not
detectable in elementary reflexes will become clear from what follows.
Judging from these elementary reactions alone, physiologists thought
that it suffices to set one or another motor act in motion (just as people
switch on an automatic lathe or start playing a gramophone record) and
it will continue to unfold by itself, autonomously, in accordance with
the inner laws of the efferent process. The task of coordination, in this
view, is only a matter of focusing and refining as perfectly as possible
this efferent neural process that flows from the brain to the muscular
system, shaping it by means of a strict and exact dynamic balance be-
tween excitations and inhibitions.
What is more or less correct for the pulling back of a pinched paw, or
for similar brief and unimportant body movements, proves utterly wrong

for those meaning-oriented motor acts that fill the whole life of an ani-
mal in its struggle for existence (not to speak of man).
Every movement, provided only that there is some real meaning and
benefit in it for a living being, invariably overcomes external forces of
some kind on its path; its entire essence consists in its goal-directed
struggle with those forces. Whether this being is swimming across a
turbulent stream, or clambering up a slope or tree, or struggling in mor-
tal combat with a rival or predator, or lying down, or running, or swarm-
ing in search of food for itself and its offspring—always and everywhere
it surmounts through its muscular efforts the external forces of gravity,
friction, hydrodynamic resistance, the action of the muscles of the ad-
versary, and so on. Here each meaning-oriented, goal-directed move-
ment (whether of an eagle, a carp, a baboon, or a human being does not
matter) solves a motor task of some kind that has arisen for this being, a
task for the solution of which it disposes of certain suitable means. Both
this motor task and those forces that have to be overcome to solve the
task belong to the outer world, outside of the living being itself, and are
not directly under its control. It can, through an exertion of its will, tense
one or another of its muscles as it wishes, but it cannot through such an
exertion of the will eliminate the force of gravity or any of those exter-
nal resistances that it has to overcome. Even the so-called passive parts
of the motor apparatus proper—the bones of the skeleton, the skin and
fat that clothe the musculature, and so on—are sources of additional, so
to speak, semi-external forces of resistance. They impede movement by
their dead weight and inertia and by the forces of mutual reaction that
arise between the conjoined links of the body.
From the aforesaid it is already quite obvious that it is impossible
correctly to solve the motor task, situated in the outer world and requir-
ing the goal-conforming conquest of external forces, unless throughout
the motor act, from start to finish, it is adjusted using all the sense or-
gans, unless instant by instant there is monitoring and checking of
whether things are moving as they should be toward the desired solution
of the task, with the necessary corrections being made at each instant
that requires them. The mechanism of these continuous ongoing correc-
tions to a movement (called sensory adjustments) has been studied for a
number of movements very precisely. It is, moreover, sufficiently well
known what grave damage the loss of one or another kind of sensibility
essential to movement and of the sensory adjustments dependent on it
inflicts on motor coordination.

A movement cannot be performed without sensory input, guided

merely by the inner laws of the balance of excitations and inhibitions,
because from the very first moment the organism is assailed mercilessly
both by external forces unknown to the organism in advance and not
under its control and by the forces of reciprocal clashes and reactions in
the long, mobile jointed chains of extremities—a gust of wind, the splash
of a wave, the leap of prey tearing itself out of a predator’s claws, the
whole boundless variety of changing external circumstances. Obviously,
in elementary acts like the pulling back of a paw or the appearance of

saliva in the mouth at the sight of food, sensory adjustments cannot be
set in motion due either to the fleeting nature of the motor act or to its
unimportance. However, there are already indications that even the pro-
cess of salivation during the chewing and swallowing of food is guided
by sensory adjustments of a specific kind, which sensitively regulate
from second to second the quantity and composition of saliva depend-
ing on the character of the food and the course of the chewing process.
The precise study of motor acts has demonstrated beyond dispute,
above all, that from the point of view of the biological result or the
effect of a movement (in man in very many motor acts it is the social
effect that comes to the fore) the blind control from within presupposed
by the old physiologists, solely by efferent impulses of any degree of
refinement, makes no sense whatsoever. It is, furthermore, of no less
importance that control of the motor organs of the body itself becomes
possible only with the mediation of sensory adjustments. From the con-
temporary point of view, the coordination of movements is none other
than the organization of the control of the motor apparatus of the body,
achieved by eliminating the enormous superfluity of its degrees of free-
dom of movement with the aid of sensory adjustments.
Thus, the role and activity of the sensory, afferent systems of the
organism only begin at the moment when they transmit the triggering
signal of the next movement. As soon as the movement has begun, there
arise in all sensory instruments of the motor apparatus (in the organs of
muscle and joint sensation first of all), in response to efferent (motor)
neural impulses flowing from the brain to the periphery of the body,
afferent impulses flowing in the opposite direction, from the periphery
to the brain, and signaling to the brain how the movement has begun and
how it has proceeded. These verifying sensory signals determine in the
brain the next necessary sensory adjustments; the latter are retransmitted
from the brain to the periphery, in a centrifugal direction, and in such

a manner the neural process throughout the duration of the movement

flows in a circle, describing a closed, unbroken ring. The fundamental,
recurrent form of the path of the neural process during the execution of
a meaning-oriented motor act is therefore the form of a reflex ring.
Much compels us now to think that the form of an open reflex arc
that previously drew the attention of physiologists and was studied by
them in detail represents merely a partial, incomplete, and in some
cases rudimentary—that is, in one way or another defective—form of
the neural process. Such a form bears witness either to the extraordi-
nary brevity and unimportance of a given reflex manifestation or—ap-
parently, even more frequently—to our inability to detect even in such a
fragmentary act the presence of the same circular sensory adjustments.
There is no doubt that in fulfilling the functions of control of the effect
of a movement and of ensuring its controllability the sensory systems of
an organism behave in a substantially different fashion than when they
generate triggering signals. Thus, neglect of the first two forms of their
activity unavoidably led to a one-sided and incomplete knowledge of
the psychophysiology of the sense organs—organs, as was rightly shown
at the beginning of this article, were studied for their own sake with
great attention and interest. The example considered vividly brings home
to us the real and not imaginary wholeness of the organism, which takes
its revenge on us for ignoring some of its functions by giving us an
incorrect and one-sided picture of the workings of a whole series of
other functions.
In fact, by confining their observations of the role of the perceptual
systems to their transmission of triggering signals, the old physiolo-
gists substantially distorted understanding not only of the tasks but
also of the very structure of the receptor (perceptual) function. To pro-
vide for signaling-triggering activity, evolutionary selection had to
maximize, above all, the degree of sensitivity of receptors and their
resolving capacity—that is, their adaptation to making subtle distinc-
tions or differentiating among similar signals. Both capacities—both
absolute and discerning high sensitivity—belong to the analytic type;
they are based on analysis, disaggregation of perceived material, the
possibility of catching amid the unceasing chaos of neutral irritants
the element that alone possesses some kind of significance as a signal
for the given individual. And, indeed, wherever receptor systems ap-
pear before us in the signaling-triggering role they display these ana-
lytic properties, showing in the higher animals an exceptional capacity

for differentiating elementary sensory signals—that is, for making dis-

tinctions among them—and for identifying these signals within a mass
of other, neutral signals, even if the former are extremely weak.
A valuable contribution of I.P. Pavlov is the idea of applying the phe-
nomena of conditioned reflex circuits that he discovered to the precise
quantitative study of both of the aforementioned aspects of the activity
of the sense organs of animals: the degree of their sensitivity and their
resolving capacity. Before Pavlov’s discoveries it seemed that there was
absolutely no way of telling how a dog or marmoset feels, sees, and

hears, whether they distinguish colors and with what degree of discrimina-
tion, what kind of sounds they perceive and recognize, and so on. The
discovery of conditioned reflexes and the laws that govern them opened
up to us, as it were, the tightly closed walls of their craniums—something
that no one had previously thought of hoping for.
The reflexological school of Pavlov quite consistently and legitimately
designated the aggregate of organs of perception in the brain by the
name “the signal system of the brain,” emphasizing by this name pre-
cisely which aspect of the perceptual function it examines and studies.
In order to emphasize man’s special capacity to use spoken words as
triggering signals, it was suggested that he has a separate second signal
system that dominates the first—in animals the only—system.
With equal consistency, the individual perceptual structures of the or-
ganism, consisting of peripheral sense organs and their central-nervous
apparatuses in the cerebral cortex, were called analyzers. As is quite
clear from the aforesaid, the reflexologists were obliged with irrefutable
logic to place at the center of attention precisely this analytic aspect of
the activity of the sensory systems, which monopolized the foreground
due to such a one-sided view of their workings.
Study of the control of integral, meaning-oriented motor acts pre-
sented the perceptual systems of the organism in an altogether different
light. Analysis of the coordinated construction of motor acts and of its
pathological disorders and investigation of how movements are con-
trolled in the circular process of the “reflex ring” sufficed to show with
all clarity that afferent systems do not signal the brain concerning the
course of a movement and provide a basis for sensory adjustments by
means of raw sensory signals, with signals of different kinds—tactile,
kinesthetic, visual, and so on—separated from one another. On the con-
trary, these perceptions, which facilitate the control of movements, al-
ways have the character of complex, integral syntheses, of molds of the

most diverse sensations deeply processed by the brain and tied together
also by numerous traces of previous sensations retained in the memory.
For example, the spatial field within which all of man’s relocational
movements, like walking and running, are organized, and in which in
normal seeing people the leading role is played by vision, is a synthesis
(well known to psychophysiologists) of directly visual sensations,
muscle-joint sensations from the muscles of the crystalline lens and eye-
balls, making possible depth perception, memory traces from the entire
preceding experience of tactile sensations, impressions from the

individual’s own relocations in space, and so on. In evolutionary terms,
the higher and the newer the level at which the control of movements is
constructed in the brain and the more complex in terms of meaning the
motor tasks that are accessible to this level, the more complex and the
further removed from primary, raw sensations the sensory synthesis that
serves the given level and the larger the element therein of internal brain
processing, meaning-infusion, ordering, and even schematization of the
primary sensations being synthesized.
If we turn from the coordinating control of movements, representing
in one way or another the technical aspect of the execution of motor
acts, to their meaning-related aspect and recall that they are responses,
solutions to motor tasks that have arisen in the outer world surrounding
a person or animal, then our assessment of the relative importance of the
synthetic and analytic principles in the function of perception will be-
come even sharper.
Obviously, comprehending the current external situation and the mo-
tor task conditioned by it, designing the correct solution to it, monitor-
ing whether the movements undertaken are proceeding correctly and
whether the matter is drawing nearer to the required outcome—all this
needs not signals, not individual sensations caught out of the general
mass and sensitively recognized. The sense organs are the windows
through which the surrounding outer world breaks through into the closed
receptacle of the brain. In order to solve the motor task correctly—for
the pike, to chase after the minnow and catch it despite all its dodging;
for the chamois, to judge correctly its distance from the cliff and leap up
onto it, saving itself from the hunt; for the bear, to seek out the hollow in
the tree trunk with the honey and scramble up to it over the knots and
outgrowths of the bark; and so on and so forth—it is necessary, above
all, to reflect correctly in the brain the surrounding world in its entirety
and in all the objects that constitute it. It is precisely in this direction

that evolution and its merciless executor, natural selection, has steadily
tended. Living beings whose perceptions distorted reality in any way
were for it an unreliable, curved mirror and were implacably sacrificed
to this selection. The entire successive evolutionary complication and
enrichment of sensory syntheses followed the line of eliminating distor-
tions and errors in the individual sense organs, providing for the cross-
checking of their readings, their interpretation, and so on. It was as though
the course of the evolutionary development of the perceptual systems of
the brain manifested the celebrated formula that was discovered by the
founders of contemporary positive science and technology and became
their motto: nature obeys those who follow its law. At all the rungs of its
development, nature has submitted itself best to those living creatures
who have perceived and interpreted it with the greatest objectivity.
Of course, to deny that the sense organs of highly developed organ-
isms have an analytic function would mean flying in the face of indis-
putable facts. But this analytic function occupies a subordinate place in
the whole of their biologically significant work, going ahead of synthe-
sis and laying the ground for it. Thus, in the activity of perceptual sys-
tems, the analytic and synthetic functions in their reciprocal working
contradiction form a clear dialectical unity within which the completing
and leading role belongs, undoubtedly, to synthesis.
The aforesaid may cast some new light on a most important question
that has worried thinkers of all ages and that opens up the whole theory
of knowledge: the question of the objective existence of the outer world
and of the mutual relations between knower and known.
Contemporary analysis of the evolutionary development of the motor
sphere shows very clearly on the biological plane how a reflection of the
outer world true to objective reality necessarily had to form in the cen-
tral nervous system. If in certain individuals it became untrue and de-
ceptive, if their reflecting “mirror” was curved, they paid for this with
defeat in the next clash between their practice and reality, and in the
final reckoning perished.
Once physiology took under its purview the whole organism, with both
its perceptual and its motor functions, the purely biological, purely evolu-
tionary preconditions were immediately and clearly revealed for the gradual
formation in central nervous systems, long before man, of objectively
correct reflections of the outer world through the mediation of organs of
active perception; and precisely motor acts, actions, living practice served
as the biological criteria that removed defective and false reflective sys-

tems from life and gave preference to the truest and most objective ones.
If the entire biological task of the perceptive function had been con-
fined to the signal-triggering and differentiating (signal-recognizing) role,
the matter might have looked substantially different. Neither of these
two tasks requires of perception objectively true reflections. In order to
mark out from the general mass of sensations an isolated signal for a
definite reaction or to distinguish it from another signal, similar but with
a different meaning, purely conventional signaling signs or codes, hav-
ing in essence nothing in common with reality, may be quite adequate.

It suffices merely that one conventional code should always correspond
precisely to, let us suppose, a useful and tasty catch, and another to a
harmful and poisonous one, and these conventional signs will be quite
suitable for the signaling role. Only the solution of integral, meaning-
oriented motor tasks in the outer world—the task that the old physiolo-
gists overlooked—requires an uncompromising and unconditionally
objective reflection in the brain of the world as it is.
It is worthy of attention that since the time, more than a hundred
years ago, when I. Müller established the so-called specific energy of
the brain’s perceptual apparatuses and their neural transmitters, the his-
tory of psychophysiology has witnessed an interminable and passionate
theoretical-epistemological dispute over the content and quality of sen-
sations on the same plane at which we have now arrived. Some take the
view that the world surrounding us is unknowable and that the sensory
signals passing from it to the brain are purely conventional in character.
The same position, as we have now seen, is also fully satisfactory to
reflexology; even the name of its basic phenomenon—the conditioned
reflex*—fully harmonizes with this view, and here it is not a matter of a
single accidental verbal coincidence. A conventional combination or cir-
cuiting is, in changed terminology, the same phenomenon that is desig-
nated in psychology by the name “association by contiguity.” Its essence
consists in the fact that one or another sensation is associated, by virtue
of a purely chance simultaneity of occurrence, with some phenomenon
of the outer world, even though the sensation is caused by a different
phenomenon and has nothing to do with the first phenomenon except
for this chance or semi-chance coincidence in time. This coincidence
*The Russian term corresponding to “conditioned reflex” is uslovnyi refleks.

The word uslovnyi is generally rendered either as “conditional” or as “conventional”
in the sense of an agreed usage chosen arbitrarily. Thus, the verbal coincidence
noted by the author occurs in Russian but not in English.—Trans.

suffices for such a sensation to enter into association by contiguity with

the first phenomenon—that is, to be made a conventional signal for the
latter. This is precisely what happens when, on the experimenter’s whim,
in one animal a blue lamp becomes the conventional (conditioned) sig-
nal for the closeness of food and the conditioned (conventional) irritant
for salivation, while in another animal the same roles are played by the
creak, whine, or beat of a metronome. However, one has to ask oneself: if
even biologically, in natural conditions, the life experience of an indi-
vidual animal is formed wholly by way of equally conventional coded

signs of objective reality, then what kind of objective reflection of the
outer world can develop within it? And is it not the rankest Machism to
conceive of the development of this reflection in such a fashion? What is
true is that when conditioned (conventional) combinations are formed in
the laboratory, the animal is deprived of the chief criterion of objectiv-
ity—practice: it is tied to an immobilizing frame and unable to do any-
thing active. In natural conditions it must construct meaning-oriented
motor acts; there is no need for me to repeat here all that I have said
above on this subject.
A different worldview is that of dialectical materialism, which is un-
able to separate perception of the outer world from practice in relation
to it, the perceptual function from the active, efferent function. Dialecti-
cal materialism cannot in principle accept any kind of conventional sym-
bolism of the neural impulses that carry sensory perceptions in the brain.
These perceptions do not stand in conditional-combinatorial connection
with reality; they are unconditionally adequate to reality, duplicate it in
reflection, and cease to do so only in states of deep emotional distur-
bance, delirium, or hallucination.
We cannot ignore the truly enormous step forward toward a material-
ist interpretation of higher nervous activity that was taken by Pavlov in
the last years of the nineteenth century on the basis of his celebrated
discovery. What was said above regarding the work of the sense or-
gans—the possibility of looking into the inner world of the animal, oth-
erwise inaccessible to us—can be extended to very many other aspects
of its mental life. By starting with lower unconditioned reflex acts that
are recognizable and accessible to direct measurement and attaching to
them at will the most diverse neural processes in the higher regions of
the brain, the physiologist was able, albeit indirectly and condition-
ally, to measure and study these latter processes, just as the physicist
studies the motion of electrons that are invisible to him from the bands

of haze that appear over their trajectories in Wilson’s camera. Uncon-

ditioned reflexes—and in first place, salivation reflexes, dearest to
Pavlov’s heart from his preceding illustrious works—turned out, thanks
to the method of conditioned reflexes, to be indicators of higher neural
processes. There is no need to argue that these indicators of higher cere-
bral processes have no essential connection with the latter, but are merely
attached to them by a temporary and conditional associative link. In
fact, the connection remains quite firm over long intervals of time, and
the parallelism between the flow of “lower” and “upper” phenomena is

remarkably stable and reliable.
This really was a great victory for spontaneous scientific material-
ism in an area where dualistic and idealist views had previously reigned
supreme and the spontaneous mechanistic materialism of the nine-
teenth century had been able to counterpose to those views anything
except declarations unsupported by experiment. This was the begin-
ning of the experimental, materialist science of the work of the higher
regions of the brain.
However, the spontaneously mechanistic character of these first ma-
terialist attacks on the strongholds of the brain could not but reveal itself
in a number of important and fundamental imperfections of the theory as
it developed further. Completely setting aside here the points of
reflexological theory that are open to dispute from the physiological point
of view (such as, e.g., its cell centrism or psychophysiological associa-
tions), let us dwell exclusively on certain methodological questions.
First of all, the discovery of a method of objective observation of
higher nervous activity in the animal was accompanied by a rigoristic,
irreconcilable persecution of any attempts to interpret observations in
psychological terms (“the dog understood”; “the dog thought”; “the dog
noticed,” etc.)—a persecution that was especially intense in the first years.
However, this persecution, which demanded that laboratory personnel
conjecture nothing beyond what could be observed directly, and which
is very impressive in its resonance with Newton’s proud dictum (“hypoth-
eses non fingo”—“I do not think up hypotheses”), also had its negative
side. First, it concealed, indubitably, DuBois-Reymond’s “ignorabimus”
(“we shall remain ignorant”), the pronouncement that the mental world
of the animal is unknowable, forbidden even to discussion. Second, the
implacable requirements of scientific thinking, having been thrown out
the laboratory door, furtively flew back under light camouflage through
the window. This circumstance, which has drawn little attention, is, in-

dubitably, worthy of examination. Although we no longer encounter psy-

chological terminology in reflexological articles and presentations, we
do find there the most detailed accounts of how groups of neural cells of
the cerebral cortex are excited and inhibited and pass through the suc-
cessive stages of parabiosis; how excitation in the cerebral cortex irradi-
ates large areas and how it again concentrates at the chronically excited
point; how, as a result of cortical induction, the excitation of one group
of cells produces the inhibition of surrounding groups; and how, finally,
the zone of predominant excitation moves around the cerebral cortex in

fantastic zigzags and with changing contours, so that, according to
Pavlov’s figurative definition, if we made these excited areas of the
cerebral cortex luminescent and the cranium transparent, we could see
directly by eye the fantastically outlined bright spot move across the
surface of the brain. . . .
But, after all, without exception, in all experiments that have been
conducted in accordance with the classical methodology of conditioned
salivation reflexes, the factual material obtained from observations that
fills the experimental protocols consists solely of counts of drops of
saliva and their distribution over time by second. All the rest (examples
of which were enumerated in the preceding paragraph) is pure conjec-
ture—precisely the kind of hypotheses that Newton proudly shunned.
What is more, not only the varieties of classical reflexological method-
ology but also all other experimental methods that have been applied to
the brain throughout the world right up to the present day, including the
most sensitive and up-to-date methodology for recording the bioelectric
potentials of the brain, have never demonstrated visually a single one of
the brain phenomena enumerated above: not the chronic excitation of
points of the cerebral cortex, not the irradiation, not the concentration,
not the induction, not even the wandering spot of excitation, although
the latter, it would seem, should have had every chance of being revealed
in such powerful developers as electronic intensifiers of bioelectric po-
tentials and cathode oscillographs.
Contemporary experimental science is sharply at variance with New-
ton in its assessment of the permissibility and importance of scientific
hypotheses. Neither physics nor chemistry, nor biology and medicine
could advance a single step without creating working hypotheses, pre-
liminary theories, assumed models of a phenomenon, and the like. The
hypothesis in experimental science has a significance similar to that of
what in construction technology is called an avantbeck. In building a

bridge across a river, the readymade girder of the bridge is firmly secured
and equilibrated on a support on one bank and gradually pushed out
over the river, hanging over it and with no support at the front end. In
such a daring but calculated position it remains until it reaches the other
bank, where it rests, at last, on the second support prepared for it there.
Now the span is closed, and all the stress pressing on the girder over
empty space, over the abyss of the river is reliably transferred to the two
supports, and through them to firm ground.
So it is with a working hypothesis. For some time it hangs over empty

space, running ahead of firmly established facts and developing conclu-
sions by pure logic alone. But, if the hypothesis is correct, the moment
inevitably arrives when one of the distant conclusions that necessarily
flows from the basic framework of the hypothesis but is not based on
already known factual material acquires objective, experimental confir-
mation. At this moment the “beak” of the girder of the hypothesis has
reached its second support and may secure itself thereon, but the hy-
pothesis continues to be of service, in some cases for an extraordinarily
long time, although the entire middle part of its logical “span” still lacks
experimental confirmation. Its durability is fully ensured by the fact
that both its initial presuppositions and its distant, final conclusions rest
firmly on experimental facts.
This digression in defense of scientific hypotheses should show that
from the standpoint of the present article the hypotheses that make up
the core of the reflexological theory of higher nervous activity have ev-
ery right to exist, despite the absence of direct experimental support for
them, for as long as they do not come up against direct experimental
refutation. However, why in this case should we consider impermissible
the previous hypotheses parallel to them, which were expressed in psy-
chological terms? Why should it be forbidden to say: “the dog noticed,”
but permissible to say: “in the cortex of the dog’s hemispheres there
emerged a dominant seat of excitation, in which the newly arrived con-
ditioned signals of irritation concentrated around the chronically aroused
point?” Why is “noticed” any less materialist than the second of the
formulations cited above? Not, of course, because the second is more
learned and scholarly. Only (and here I see no other possible explana-
tion) because the persecution of “noticed” and like terms arises from a
sharply dualistic point of view: on one side, the dog’s mind, the spiri-
tual, the unknowable; on the other, the no less hypothetical, but expressed
wholly in terms of (spontaneous) materialism. That is why one group of

hypotheses is given such sharp, fundamental preference over another.

Had the reflexologists proceeded from a dialectical recognition of the
unity of the mental and the material, regarding the mental as a function
of matter organized to the highest degree, such a chasm between the two
would not have opened up before them.
However, was this struggle against the psychological set of terms and
concepts not merely a result of the fact that throughout the first years of
reflexology the object of study was the dog, the mental world of which
really is hard to penetrate? No, this is not so, and this is proved by the
record of reflexology over the past two decades. During this period its
focus has switched from animals to man, and yet the reflexologists
(Ivanov-Smolenskii, Krasnogorskii, Kanaev, and others) continue to in-
sist, no less ardently, on their exclusive right to claim an objective and
materialist approach to the higher forms of nervous activity. Here, it
would seem, the problem of the impossibility of direct contact with the
mental world of the experimental subject completely disappears. But even
here the same old illusion, according to which hypotheses concerning
irradiation and concentration are more materialist than hypotheses con-
cerning “noticed” and “understood,” colors conventionally reflexological
investigations in chosen-objective tones—at least in the eyes of the
reflexologists themselves.
And all the same, when after hundreds of combinations an experi-
menter induces in a dog, tied to a frame and supplied with a saliva-
collecting capsule on the surface of the cheek, a differentiated conditioned
reflex to a light or a tap, and reinforces it with biscuit powder, we are
filled with admiration, as we were forty years ago, at the remarkable
idea of the Russian scientist who opened for us the doors into the animal
cranium.
But when an experimenter attaches saliva-collecting capsules to the
cheeks of school-age children, when he records their salivation in drops
on the kymograph, and induces in the kids, who have been learning a
little rhyme by heart for five, seven, or sometimes fifteen days, a condi-
tioned salivation reflex to the irritant of a metronome beat, and rein-
forces it by feeding them sugared cranberries, and when he sums up the
investigation in the words: “by the applied method, we can embark firmly
on the path of systematic study of the phenogenetics of higher nervous
activity—on the path of study of the history of the establishment of the
personality and of the character of man in the light of physiology”—
then, it seems, he goes beyond compromising Pavlov’s brilliant original

neurophysiological idea to making an intolerable mockery both of the

schoolchildren and of science.1
These and similar uncritical transfers of methodology from the dog
to man, this unshakable confidence in the unconditional superiority of
the method of counting drops of saliva over all other methods for pen-
etrating into “the establishment of the personality and the character of
man” bears witness, above all, to the insuperable force of traditions,
ingrained habits, and dogmas that evidently impede the progress of sci-
ence. What was fifty years ago a great victory and will forever remain in
the history of physiology an outstanding landmark of the placing of the
science of the brain on a materialist basis now begins increasingly to
warp and to trample underfoot new ideas, new facts, new knowledge. It
would be a great pity if scientific thought, instead of thrilling in its eter-
nal striving forward, were to get stuck at some level just because that
level was once a great achievement of science.
The cited comparison of salivation conditioned-reflex methodology
with cranberries as applied to analysis of the personality and character
of schoolchildren brings to mind the impression I got in my youth from
visiting one laboratory that was headed at the time by a very aged scien-
tist. This old man had received his scientific training long before the
appearance of the simplest electrical equipment, and I was both dumb-
founded and touched to see that in the laboratory setup of the revered
old man all electrical devices—lamps, bells, and so on—were switched
on from another room by means of pneumatic transmission, in the same
way that doorbells outside apartments were once set up. The experi-
menter has near at hand a pear-shaped balloon; this is connected to the
second room by an air tube that leads to an electric switch fitted into a
lamp-socket. This picture of the power of ancient tradition gave me a
good, unforgettable lesson.
Returning to the direct topic of the present article, it must be ac-
knowledged that in the half-century that has passed since the time of the
basic discovery of reflexology quite a few new facts and new methods
for observing them have accumulated. In particular, returning to the sig-
nificance of the salivation reflex as an indicator of processes of higher
nervous activity, over this period there inevitably came to light a num-
ber of substantially weak sides of this indicator. Neural processes—in
conductors, in synapses, and in terminal apparatuses—flow at lightning
speed; methods for recording bioelectric phenomena have shown that
these processes are measured in milliseconds and tenths of millisec-

onds. In measurements of the functioning of the saliva glands it is not

always possible to go with confidence lower than tenths of a second.
The complexity and diversity of neural processes are well known; their
substrata—in man—number in the tens of thousands of motor neuro-
muscular units (motons), in the hundreds of thousands of conducting
threads, and (according to the data of von Economo) in the tens of mil-
lions of nerve cells. However, the salivation process takes place in one
dimension. To use the language of applied mathematics, it changes in
one parameter: for any time interval it is capable of giving only one
figure (number of drops, their total volume, etc.) to describe the pro-
cesses that have occurred in this interval.2 Against the background of
this inflexibility and paucity, it is appropriate to recall everything about
those motor acts to which the present article is devoted. Even consid-
ered from the purely external aspect of their motor structure, these acts,
which originate in the same central nervous system as complex secre-
tion, in the role of indicators of its processes offer us immeasurably
greater possibilities. Movements may be performed at very high speed
(in man up to 25–30 meters and up to 9–10 oscillation cycles per sec-
ond; in insects up to 500 oscillations per second and more). The motor
apparatus of the human body contains hundreds of joints and even more
degrees of freedom of movement—magnitudes that contemporary ma-
chine-building technology is still immeasurably far from attaining. Each
of these degrees of freedom is an independent variable parameter for
describing efferent brain processes and—potentially—can be recorded
with any degree of precision. The laboratory technique of our time re-
mains far from mastery of this overwhelming wealth and diversity of
the structural detail of the living movement. It must be said, however,
that the scientific personnel of the State Central Scientific Research In-
stitute of Physical Culture have already brought the technique of record-
ing movements to the point of being able to record up to fifty parameters
of a movement simultaneously, with a resolving capacity of up to two
hundredths of a second or better. The prospects for the further expan-
sion of recording possibilities are quite boundless here.
Motor acts are incomparably even more promising as indicators of
nervous activity when they are approached from their internal aspect,
from the point of view of their meaning-related structure. As contempo-
rary Soviet comparative physiology has established, both the motor
resources of vertebrates and their central-nervous substrata have trav-
eled a long and very complex path of evolutionary development. This

development has been accomplished in the form of a series of unique

successive dialectical leaps, as a result of which the brain has grown
more complex with the emergence of new structural elements that domi-
nate the older ones, while the motor system has acquired an entire new
class of movements capable of solving motor tasks at a higher level of
complexity of meaning. In this way, there gradually developed move-
ments of ground and airborne locomotion, more complex movements
for hunting, movements for building dwelling places, movements for
upbringing and education, movements for grooming, for dancing, for

labor, and, finally, for speech and writing in man. All these successively
formed “levels of the construction of movements,” as the contemporary
physiology of motor acts calls them, varying in evolutionary age from
hundreds of millions of years down to a few thousand, have been pre-
served by and large in man, where they constitute an entire hierarchical
ladder of mutual subordination. On this ladder of levels, man rises above
the animals by at least two “floors”: the upper of these belongs exclu-
sively to man (level “E” of speech and writing), while the lower (level
“D” of object-related actions and chains of meaning) is observable in
rudimentary forms in the highest mammals. It is a matter of extraordi-
nary interest that the lowest, most ancient levels, which are already present
in fish, amphibians, and reptiles, have been preserved in man together
with both their brain substrata and the lists of corresponding motor
tasks (of course, with a whole series of corrections and adjustments
related to numerous adaptive changes). In part these lower levels con-
tinue to control, even in man, the most ancient and, in respect of mean-
ing, primitive motor acts (swallowing, scratching, swimming, walking,
etc.); in part they have entered into a kind of physiological coopera-
tion with the higher, purely human levels that rely on the cortex of the
cerebral hemispheres. It is precisely these lower coordinating levels
that provide complex meaning-oriented movements—movements of
labor, combat, sports, and so on—with their technical, “background”
coordinative finishing, with corresponding adjustments, and with those
special auxiliary coordinative structures that are called automatisms.
Thus, the complex and highly organized motor act of man is performed
under the control of an entire orchestra of brain levels. The higher and
leading level executes and adjusts in the course of the movement the
decisive, meaning-related aspect of the act, ensuring the successful so-
lution of the motor task in its entirety. The lower levels assume subordi-

nate, background roles, function in the given movement without the par-
ticipation of the consciousness, and provide it with coherence, precision,
smoothness, economy—in short, with everything that distinguishes a
highly developed motor skill from the movements of a novice.
By reason of all that has been said, motor acts appear by far the most
suitable for use as objective, external indicators of nervous activity. Of
course, our starting point here must be an examination of the motor act
as an integral structure, united (or integrated, as they say) by the whole
meaning of the motor task that it solves and of the plan proper that
implements this solution. The artificial and naive attempts that have been
made by some especially orthodox reflexologists to stretch reflexological
language to the point of absurdity and to represent any integral mean-
ing-oriented act as a chain of reflexes must be rejected in the most deci-
sive fashion.3
The advantage of integral motor acts as indicators over all other known
acts lies precisely in the fact that in movements of diverse meaning-
related structure we have direct representatives of the most varied level-
specific systems and floors of the brain, from the lowest and most ancient,
which control breathing, swallowing, and coughing, to the highest and
exclusively human levels of the highest symbolic actions. Here the need
completely falls away for any conventional links between the indicator
and the process of interest to the investigator at one or another higher
structural floor of the brain. This conventional combination of the lower
with the higher created a brilliant way out of the situation at a time when
the level of development of physiology made no other methods of indi-
cation available to experimental technique. Now, when motor acts have
been decoded in principle as unconditional, direct surface reflections of
processes occurring in the central nervous system from the top down,
the question has been raised opportunely to a new, dialectically higher
level. Of course, a more complex and flexible indicator also requires
more complex decoding methods, especially because, as I explained at
the beginning of the article, alongside internal forces the execution of a
movement always involves the participation of an external force field,
which has to be skillfully broken down and screened out. But this is a
question no longer of principle but of technique, a question of the ap-
pearance of a new Champillon to read these hieroglyphics, and we shall
not have to wait long for Soviet youth to give us such a scientist. And
then we shall be in a position to read from these documents of uncondi-

tional, flexible, and precise reflections of higher and lower nervous ac-
tivity many new pages, now opening before us, of the enthralling and
rigorous dialectical-materialist science of that most perfect and aston-
ishing of all natural formations—the human brain.
Notes
1. P. Kanaev, “Eksperimental’naia genetika vysshei nervnoi deiatel’nosti

cheloveka,” Uspekhi sovremennoi biologii, 1948, vol. 25, no. 1, p. 149.
2. Let us note that motor reflexes too (for example, reflexes to pain or defensive
reflexes), when applied in the role of indicators of nervous reflex activity, give just
one variable parameter on recordings, although one that changes more rapidly over
time than does the secretion of saliva.
3. For example, in A.N. Krestovnikov we read: “The complex combined move-
ment of tonic proprioceptive reflexes is the running leap onto a higher point. The
leap consists of the run, the push-off, the flight, the crossing of the plank, the straight-
ening, and the landing. The run consists of the relocation reflex and the support
reflex (before the plank), which passes over into the pushing-off reflex (recoil re-
flex) and the active lifting reflex (spinning foot), which produces the reflex unbend-
ing of the support foot, the further lift of the push-off foot, and its pulling-up after
the spinning foot is let down onto the plank. . . . Finally, after the straightening we
observe the landing reflex, which upon making contact with the ground passes over
into the body support reflex” (Fiziologiia cheloveka [Moscow, 1938], p. 69). I have
no doubt, of course, that the leave-taking reflex that followed this leap produced in
the audience the stormy applause reflex and in the lecturer the reflex of leaving to
get the tram home. In similar fashion, in Scarron’s hell the shade of the coachman
used the shade of a brush to wipe the shade of dirt off the shade of his carriage.
To order reprints, call 1-800-352-2210; outside the United States, call 717-632-3535.

Basic Methodological Positions of The Physiology of Movements

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Journal of Russian & East European Psychology

ISSN: 1061-0405 (Print) 1558-0415 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mrpo20

Basic Methodological Positions of the Physiology

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Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 44, no. 2,

Basic Methodological Positions

Up to now the physiology of movements in general, and the physiology

01basic method.pmd 12 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

Reflexes of the Brain [Refleksy golovnogo mozga], written by the young

a chance episode in the life of Sechenov himself, who never specially

01basic method.pmd 13 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

the underdevelopment of such a significant field of physiology has caused,

01basic method.pmd 14 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

Of all the efferent manifestations of the organism’s activity, the at-

in all of them the perceptual or afferent function necessarily takes part

01basic method.pmd 15 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

01basic method.pmd 16 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

A movement cannot be performed without sensory input, guided

in elementary acts like the pulling back of a paw or the appearance of

01basic method.pmd 17 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

a manner the neural process throughout the duration of the movement

01basic method.pmd 18 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

for differentiating elementary sensory signals—that is, for making dis-

absolutely no way of telling how a dog or marmoset feels, sees, and

01basic method.pmd 19 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

preceding experience of tactile sensations, impressions from the

01basic method.pmd 20 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

01basic method.pmd 21 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

ing in essence nothing in common with reality, may be quite adequate.

*The Russian term corresponding to “conditioned reflex” is uslovnyi refleks.

01basic method.pmd 22 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

suffices for such a sensation to enter into association by contiguity with

vidual animal is formed wholly by way of equally conventional coded

01basic method.pmd 23 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

of haze that appear over their trajectories in Wilson’s camera. Uncon-

the parallelism between the flow of “lower” and “upper” phenomena is

01basic method.pmd 24 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

dubitably, worthy of examination. Although we no longer encounter psy-

the zone of predominant excitation moves around the cerebral cortex in

01basic method.pmd 25 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

So it is with a working hypothesis. For some time it hangs over empty

01basic method.pmd 26 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

hypotheses is given such sharp, fundamental preference over another.

01basic method.pmd 27 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

neurophysiological idea to making an intolerable mockery both of the

01basic method.pmd 28 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

onds. In measurements of the functioning of the saliva glands it is not

01basic method.pmd 29 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

development has been accomplished in the form of a series of unique

upbringing and education, movements for grooming, for dancing, for

01basic method.pmd 30 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

01basic method.pmd 31 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

1. P. Kanaev, “Eksperimental’naia genetika vysshei nervnoi deiatel’nosti

01basic method.pmd 32 5/25/2006, 10:17 AM

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