Journal of Russian & East European Psychology

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

New Lines of Development in Contemporary

Physiology

N.A. BERNSTEIN

To cite this article: N.A. BERNSTEIN (2006) New Lines of Development in Contemporary
Physiology, Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 44:2, 60-67

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-0405440203

Published online: 08 Dec 2014.

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 60 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

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

March–April 2006, pp. 60–67.
© 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061–0405/2006 $9.50 + 0.00.

N.A. BERNSTEIN

New Lines of Development

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in Contemporary Physiology

Each stage of development of productive forms creates new demands on

the existing branches of science, also generating in passing new scien-
tific disciplines that are called on to respond to these demands and illu-
minate the lines of their further evolution. Quantum and nuclear physics,
and in the past decade cybernetics, which have arisen before the eyes of
our generation, may serve as examples of such new branches. Both in
the newborn disciplines and in the old sciences entering a new period of
development, the emergence of new problems and the discovery of new
research methods in response to them always go hand in hand.
At the present time, the biological group of sciences and, in particu-
lar, the one that is thematically closest to me, physiology, are going
through precisely such a pivotal period. As a counterweight to the sub-
stantial isolation from the needs of practice that distinguished physiol-
ogy in the past century, in the period since World War I a group of applied
physiological sciences has arisen, including the psychophysiology of
labor, craftsmanship, and sports, and the various branches of occupa-
tional physiology. In defiance of the goals of the old physiology, which
was animal physiology throughout the nineteenth century, the problems
of the physiology of the human organism are now coming to the fore.
We shall not let ourselves be detained by these trends that are al-
ready almost a half- century old, but dwell on the changes in course that

English translation © 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2004 Smysl.
“Novye linii razvitiia v sovremennoi fiziologii,” in Nikolai Bernshtein: ot refleksa k
modeli budushchego, ed. I.M. Feigenberg (Moscow: Smysl, 2004), pp. 200–232.
Translated by Stephen D. Shenfield.

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physiology is undergoing now, before our eyes. Starting with the “lead-
ing variable,” the newly emerging problematic, we shall then make a
very cursory examination of the group of new methods that are striving
to respond to this problematic.
In the applied sphere, our attention is drawn to the cooling of interest
in questions of the physiology of physical labor, which a few decades
ago occupied the predominant place in the form of the ergonomics of
labor, biomechanics, medical monitoring, and so on. In a natural man-
ner, in connection with the progressive shift in the center of gravity of
occupational employment toward more refined and intellectual forms
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of the worker’s participation in mechanized production processes, new

problems, not even thought about previously, are coming to the fore in
applied physiology.
Two large groups of problems, apparently, occupy the chief place
here. One of these groups, the most closely connected with cybernetics
and in no small measure a catalyst of its emergence, is the problematic
of man’s activity as one of the links in the complex that connects the
worker into a single whole with a machine or any other technological
device. Included here are both questions of rational control over those
elements of the complex that it is either impossible or inexpedient to
entrust to automation and questions of the organization of two-way com-
munications, which point to quite new aspects of the physiology of re-
ceptors and of complex forms of reaction. A few examples of such aspects
are: the problem of the mutual relations between signal and noise; analysis
of thresholds for the recognition and differentiation of configurations;
and, finally, questions of coding and, in general, all the numerous points
of contact between the physiology of receptors and the general theory of
information.
The second of the aforementioned groups of questions, which could
also arise only after technology had reached its current level, consists of
questions of man’s activity in extraordinary conditions that impose severe
additional burdens on the organism and make especially great demands
on his adaptability. In first place here, if not in terms of economic im-
portance then in their connection with the vivid heroics of our country’s
achievements, are questions of the life activity and functioning of the
organism in conditions of space flight, during the phases of high-gravity
overload and weightlessness and at times of those still inevitable devia-
tions from the optimum of comfort that even the most careful insulation
and air conditioning of the spaceship cabin cannot eliminate. But apart

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from cosmonautics, which, evidently, will long remain a preserve of the

chosen few, contemporary technology abounds with forms of activity
that impose a very great burden on man’s central nervous system.
Theoretical thinking in physiology has proved noticeably more inert
in its response to the tasks raised by practice. By comparison with the
broad range of applied areas that were described briefly above, the sphere
of its achievements and even intentions is still very restricted. It is,
undoubtedly, the duty of us all, and especially of the younger generation
of physiologists, to eliminate this lag in theory and to seek out and for-
mulate new starting points for research, new working hypotheses and
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fundamental reappraisals.
At the present moment it seems possible to identify two lines of theo-
retical development that are indisputably new but have already succeeded
to some degree in formulating their right to exist and initial tasks.
The first line is the group of questions of physiological regulation
that are connected in the closest fashion with the theory of automatic
regulation. The first steps here, following the formulation of basic prin-
ciple, were investigations into the stabilizing regulatory systems of the
organism: the systems of thermal regulation, regulation of the blood,
control of circulatory processes, and so on. In recent years there have
also begun to appear investigations of monitoring-regulatory systems,
the most advanced of which so far are investigations of ring-wise con-
trol of the pupil reaction and of eye movements. At the same time, there
is an expanding range of investigations into muscle tonus and muscular
automatisms: the rhythm of wing and sound-emitting mechanisms in
the insect, physiological clonuses and tremors in man and the higher
animals, the statics of standing, vestibular-otolitic regulation of tonus,
and other topics. The crucial leading principle of any and all regulatory
processes of this kind—the principle of cyclical control by feedback—
was formulated in our literature definitely earlier than in the West: as
applied to control of the motor apparatus, by P.K. Anokhin in 1934, and
also in a report presented in 1929. After many prolonged scientific battles,
the leading and universal significance of this principle is now recognized
by all.
It needs to be emphasized that recognition of this principle of ring-
wise interdependence has cast a new and more profound light on the
fact of the indissoluble wholeness of the organism in all its functions.
Physiologists who stood on the positions of the open-ended reflex arc
also understood the necessity of the coordinated participation of the sen-

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sory, efferent, and central systems in each act of the organism. But
these positions necessarily led to the treatment of each nonmomentary
process as a mosaic of successive reflexes, broken off each time at the
end of the arc. Only the replacement of these arcs by the principle of the
reflex ring has placed on a real foundation our understanding of the inte-
gral, uninterrupted interconnection of the three named systems both in
coexistence and in time.
The second line of the theoretical renewal of physiology is the field
of the physiology of activeness, which is being born before our eyes.
There is an increasingly urgent need to broaden the range of functions
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studied by physiology to include the most important active actions, as

opposed to the reactive processes that have almost monopolized the at-
tention of physiologists. The focusing of attention on reactive functions,
determined in accordance with law by the external stimuli that trigger
them, was conditioned, apparently, by their greater accessibility to ex-
perimentation, as most such processes could be studied in the laboratory,
on animals tied to an immobilizing frame, and, not infrequently, under
anesthesia. It was also easier to formulate the task of an investigation,
which amounted in each case to finding the law in accordance with which
a given change in the “inputs” of an organism necessarily causes one
rather than another responding manifestation in its “outputs.” It is not
hard to see, however, that by thus confining the concept of the organism
within the bounds of a reactive machine one leaves outside one’s field of
vision the biologically most important manifestations of its life activity.
In these manifestations, the living being defines and sets itself action
tasks that respond to but are not wholly determined by a stimulus. It
does not flow in the current of a guiding environmental stimulation but
engages in struggle against both its environment and the flowing stimu-
lation, overcoming and changing them in accordance with its own best
biological interest. It is easy to understand that the switching of scien-
tific attention to these processes of activeness is simultaneously a re-
nunciation of the mechanicism of treating the organism as a “reactive
machine” and a further move away from the monopoly of the reflex arc
as the building block of behavior—a monopoly that has already played
out its once progressive role in the history of objective knowledge.
The most peculiar and characteristic circumstance that physiology
runs up against when it turns to the problem of activeness is the follow-
ing. The next action task formulated by the individual “from within,”
taking into account, but not mechanically conditioned by, the current

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situation, is of necessity constructed as a kind of extrapolation of the

future. It is possible to program an action in conformity with a goal only
on the basis of a definite image or model of the result to which this
action must lead and for the sake of which it is undertaken. But because
forthcoming events can be evaluated or foreseen only “by way of proba-
bilistic forecasting” (the apt term of I.M. Feigenberg), it is clear that our
approach to the analysis of all the physiological processes concealed
here must also be based on probability theory and its latest offshoots. I
shall return to the latter below.
In concluding this section, I would like to note that, besides the bio-
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logical importance of the functions that it studies, the physiology of

activeness also involves another methodologically important step. The
proposition concerning probabilistic modeling of the future, which un-
derlies the activeness of all organisms, from the lowest ones up, enables
us to formulate a strictly materialist interpretation of such concepts as
goal-conformity or goal-directedness, which up to now have belonged
exclusively to vitalists and teleologists. At the same time, this proposi-
tion, together with the consequences that flow from it, draws a very
sharp and fundamental dividing line between the possibilities of the liv-
ing organism and all that is accessible to works that are thinkable today.
Physiology, in collaboration with cybernetics, still faces the task of teasing
out and formulating the internal mechanisms that underlie the “repre-
sentation of the future in the present” here under discussion.
Now I must try in the most cursory fashion to systematize and name
the methods at the disposal of contemporary physiology that seem most
promising for the illumination in the near future of the problematic
sketched above.
In the sphere of experimental apparatus, of course, first place must be
assigned to the broad group of electrographic methods that has arisen in
direct connection with the development of electronic technology. The
list of the varieties of methods in this group and of the fields of their
application is already very long and sufficiently well known. Therefore,
I do not undertake to enumerate them, but shall draw attention only to a
few enriched and original methods. These include, first, complex meth-
ods for the study of configurations, such as the use of multiple elec-
trodes for electroencephalographic mapping (M.N. Livanov, G. Walter),
which aims to give a coherent picture of the distribution of the neural
process within the cerebral cortex, and vector-cardiographic equipment
that reproduces a full spatial picture of the variable electrical field of the

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heart. A second “enriched” group consists of methods in which the

process under examination is instantaneously analyzed or transformed
in one way or another in order to clarify its essence. Examples include
summators or integrators of the amplitudes of an oscillatory process in
the brain or in a muscle, synchronous analyzers of frequency spectra,
automatic correlographs, and devices that amplify many times the signal-
to-noise ratio in cases of barely detectable processes. Finally, mention
should be made in this context of micromanipulation devices for study-
ing the activeness of single fibers or endings that make it possible to
detect the subtlest manifestations of activeness, such as generator po-
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tentials, “miniature” potentials, and functions of Paccini corpuscles or

gamma-efferents.
These same powerful resources of electronics have now also opened
up the possibility of diverse applied use of the aforementioned prin-
ciples of feedback and ring-wise interaction. As vivid examples I can
refer here to automatic instruments for temporarily switching off blood
circulation in small circuits or the heart as a whole, automata for con-
tinuous analysis and circular stimulation of heart rhythm (M.L. Tsetlin),
and motorized prostheses controlled by enhanced biopotentials from
muscular stumps of amputated arms or legs (Kobrinskii and Gurfinkel).
Further progress in this direction will lead, undoubtedly, to the creation
of active sensitized prostheses using implanted electrodes and transis-
tors; the Moscow Institute of Prosthetics is currently working on this.
Passing now from experimental methods to methods of analysis, I must
note first of all the rapidly expanding introduction of mathematics into the
elaboration of physiological problems and experimental results. The same
powerful electronic technology has created here, in the form of computa-
tional-analytical machines of both digital and analogue type, new means
for every conceivable kind of analysis of the results of experiments and
for experimental modeling. Although the model toy tortoises and mice
that were the height of fashion at one time are of no serious help to
science, there can be no doubt regarding the real heuristic value of ex-
perimental modeling of a different kind, often unaccompanied by the
construction of models in metal. As an illustration of experimental mod-
eling that is capable of leading to really valuable scientific conclusions,
we may take the verification of working hypotheses—concerning, for in-
stance, the functions of neural networks in the brain—by running con-
jectural programs on an analytical machine and comparing the results
with the functioning of the living brain.

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It remains to say a few words about another way in which mathematics

becomes incorporated into the biological disciplines. The entire history
of science, beginning with ancient China and Egypt, demonstrates that
new branches and areas have arisen and developed in mathematics as a
direct function of newly arisen practical needs and common tasks. Each
of the successively created mathematical disciplines emerged on the basis
of the maturation of newly defined scientific and technological ques-
tions and the demand for their quantitative solution. This was how the
calculation of infinitesimals was born and took enormous strides for-
ward in the eighteenth century. This was how probability theory and
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mathematical statistics developed in the nineteenth century out of the

almost recreational tasks in the analysis of games of chance with which
the old algebraists occupied themselves. And so on. Each such new branch
of mathematics was created because the previous resources of math-
ematics did not supply the key to “unlock” a qualitatively new branch of
natural science or technology. The same thing is taking place before our
eyes with the “mathematization” of biology. Therefore, alongside the
expansion of computational capacities referred to above, which entails
nothing that is fundamentally new, we observe the perhaps still insuffi-
ciently determinate but persistent elaboration of mathematical disciplines
that either are completely new or have never before been thought of as
relevant to the needs of biology. In the same way, no seventeenth-century
scientist could have envisioned the applicability of the principles of prob-
ability theory to the physics of liquids or gases.
The first branches of mathematics to find application in biology were
the statistics of variations and the theory of errors. Encountering more
and more points of application in toxicology, bacteriology, genetics, ecol-
ogy, and other fields of biology, both these disciplines continue today to
acquire new and more precise methods of analysis.
The interest in the general theory of information that was generated
by the tasks of cybernetics has not only led to its being placed on a firm
mathematical footing, but has also brought along with it into psycho-
physiological and biological problems the broad field of mathematical
logic. Attempts are being made to use the latter in dealing with prob-
lems of the physiology and pathology of speech, in analyzing the func-
tions of neural networks, in the theory of coding in the nervous system
(the problem of the specificity of a neural impulse), and so on. Finally,
the arousal of interest in the physiology of activeness, with its interpre-
tation of probabilistic forecasting and of the struggle against the envi-

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ronment to accomplish a set task, is leading to attempts to comprehend

both the dynamic “equilibrium” of the organism with its milieu and its
homeostasis as chains of actively conflictual states with the surrounding
world and to place at the service of physiology branches of mathematics
such as the general theory of games, the theory of conflicts, and the
theory of strategies, the relevance of which had previously been envi-
sioned least of all.
These and other similar quests for fundamentally new areas of
mathematics capable of evoking the greatest resonance with the needs
of biology are so diverse that it does not seem possible to enumerate
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them all. It is very likely that in the nearest future we shall see among
them such areas as, for instance, the theory of configurations, the need
for which is already clearly felt in efforts to comprehend mechanisms of
regeneration and morphogenesis, the principles of hereditary transmis-
sion, and also the still enigmatic field of the recognition of geometrical
figures. The currently most abstract branches of general set theory, the
theory of groups, and so on will add their contribution. It would be useless
even to try to forecast which of these areas will fall by the wayside,
which will expand, and which will be born anew. One thing alone is
clear: that the biological group of sciences has now reached some kind of
important watershed or mountain pass, beyond which, as also occurs on
journeys, there opens up to the gaze a broad panorama of unexplored
lands. It is there that we now, in a planned fashion, have to make our way.

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