A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY
IN
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Volume VI
Edited by
Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1974
Jerzy Konorski
This work is dedicated to the memory of Stefan Miller, whose close
cooperation in the remote past was decisive for the accomplishments described
in these pages, and to all my friends in
FIRST STEPS (1927-1931)
A reader who is for some reason interested in the biography of a
scientist would want to know where and when he was born and how it happened
that he became a scientist. To satisfy this curiosity, I shall mention that I
was born on December 1, 1903, in Łódź,
an industrial Polish city with a population of half a million, which at that
time belonged to Czarist Russia. My father was a lawyer,
I was the youngest of his four children. In 1910 I went to a Polish gymnasium,
which was a combination of elementary and high school. At that time there were in Polish cities either governmental Russian
gymnasia or Polish gymnasia, which were private or semiprivate. It was,
however, considered utterly unpatriotic to send one's children to Russian
schools, which were under social boycott.
I finished the
gymnasium in 1921, after
Because of this lack of determination of which speciality
to choose, I began to study mathematics at
A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY 186
law, where there were lectures by a famous
professor of the theory of law, Ignacy Petrazycki, who had come to
fear, hunger, thirst, curiosity, and many others.
He considered these processes to be at the same time afferent and efferent;
that is, they were thought to contain both the receptive experiences and the
urge to react in a particular way. He considered that the perceptions and
feelings, on the one hand, and volitional acts, on the other, derived from
emotions. His book The Foundations of
Emotional Psychology, published originally in Russian (Petrazycki,
1908) and then translated into Polish (Petrazycki,
1959), is now in total oblivion, although his ideas were very progressive and,
as a matter of fact, most of them can be still considered quite modern. This
was perhaps the first scientific book which influenced my thinking and helped
to shape my ideas. I finally decided to study medicine, hoping that neurology
and psychiatry would teach me how the brain works. I knew nothing about the
physiology of the brain, except the meager facts presented in Polish textbooks
of physiology.
My study of medicine was another string of disappointments. The study of
anatomy contained a great number of data which had to be learned by heart and
which were of no use to me. In particular, the anatomy of the skull and the
brain contained innumerable details difficult to memorize, but completely
devoid of any functional meaning. It was very frustrating for me that, being
obliged to learn an extensive bulk of facts concerning human anatomy, physiology,
and pathology, I still could not learn anything about how the brain works.
Rescue from this troublesome and seemingly hopeless situation came quite
unexpectedly. This happened in 1927 during my third year of medical studies. I
was then on very friendly terms with a colleague, Stefan Miller, whose
scientific interests were exactly the same as mine. We both came quite
incidentally across two of Pavlov's books on conditioned reflexes, which had
just been published (Pavlov, 1925, 1926). The books were written in Russian,
but Miller had spent his childhood in
The extent of our excitement brought about by this discovery is
difficult to describe. We became entirely involved in studying Pavlov, and only
by some miracle, not quite clear to me yet, did we succeed in being graduated
in medicine. We assigned to the obligatory courses in medicine a strict minimum
of time and went to our exams after a few weeks of hasty learning. This is why my
knowledge of the clinical disciplines is now almost nil.
It was purely a matter of my short-term memory, and I completely forgot
everything I had learned as soon as the exam was over. Instead of medicine, we
read and reread Pavlov and discussed every detail of the experimental work of
his coworkers. Moreover, we found in the library of the Nencki
Institute of Experimental Biology the Russian journals in which the papers on
conditioned reflexes were published.
JERZY
KONORSKI
187
After some time spent on these studies, we began to realize that Pavlovian conditioned reflexes are not sufficient to
explain the whole acquired behavior of animals and men, as Pavlov had claimed.
In particular, we became aware that the motor behavior established by way of
reward and punishment could not be reduced to the paradigm of these reflexes.
Accordingly, we began to ponder how it would be possible to incorporate the
experiments involving motor behavior into the general scheme of Pavlovian experimentation.
After some consideration we came to the conclusion that the proper
paradigm of experiments fulfilling this purpose should run as follows: If a
given neutral stimulus, say the sound of a metronome, is combined with a given
movement, say raising the leg, and it is then reinforced by food, whereas the
same stimulus presented separately is not reinforced (in other words, when the
movement is the necessary condition for obtaining food), then the animal should
perform that movement in the presence of the stimulus. On the contrary, when
the movement following a given stimulus is reinforced by a noxious agent,
whereas the stimulus alone is not, then the animal should resist performing
that movement. Since we considered that such conditioned reflexes differ
essentially from those of Pavlov, we decided to call them conditioned reflexes
of the second type, whereas the Pavlovian conditioned
reflexes we denoted as first type.
After settling on this project of experimental work, we began to look for
a laboratory where the experiments could be performed. Accordingly, we approached
several professors of medicine, asking them to provide us with a room and
facilities to start our experiments. Our inquiries were, however, completely
unsuccessful. The reason for our failures was obvious, and I don't think these
professors should be blamed. After all, here were two young students trying to
persuade a distinguished professor that they planned to perform experiments
constituting an essential complementation of Pavlov's research work, and the
professor (not being acquainted with the area concerned) was rather suspicious
of the supplicants and anxious to get rid of them. Therefore, we went from one
distinguished man to another, telling them about our plans, and were always
politely refused.
I don't remember who suggested that we approach Professor Jacob Segal,
who had a chair of psychology in the
The first thing we had to do was to buy a dog. For this purpose we went
to the marketplace, found the area where people sold dogs, and after long
deliberations, chose a young and nice bulldog, which cost ten zlotys
(about one dollar). We called him Bobek. He
immediately became friendly with us and we brought
188 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
him to our "laboratory." The housekeeper
agreed to let him stay in her apartment.
Our next task was to organize a conditioned reflex laboratory in the
room which was assigned to us. Putting together two square stools we made a
"Pavlovian stand" and used cardboards for a
screen. The bowl was made of tin and was fixed to the front part of the stand.
Pieces of food were thrown from the small aperture in the screen by the
experimenter. I do not remember how the horizontal bar above the stand was
fixed in order to keep the animal in the harness during the experimental
sessions. Since in the department of psychology there was a kimograph
with a long tape, we utilized this for recording the dog's movements. For a
long time we used a strip of toilet paper, which was both cheap and convenient,
provided that it was relatively smooth and did not have transversal
perforations. You can imagine the comical picture presented by two serious
young men going to a paper store and asking to be shown all the possible
varieties of toilet paper, scrutinizing them thoroughly, and choosing the one
which fulfilled both conditions. Recording of movements was accomplished by a
very primitive and crude arrangement made mainly out of pieces of wire.
The first experiment was performed in the following way. A band with
electrodes connected with the induction coil was attached to the dog’s
left hind paw. We presented a tone from a harmonium (luckily found in our lab),
and after a few seconds a light electric shock was applied to the paw. When the
dog lifted his leg, immediately a piece of sausage was thrown into the bowl.
Occasionally the tone was presented without the shock and without reinforcement.
We considered it a great triumph when after a few days of such
procedure, Bobek began to lift his left hind leg
without the electric shock, turning immediately to the bowl and expecting
food. At the beginning he did so both to the tone and in the intervals, but
very soon the intertrial movements disappeared. Thus,
we succeeded for the first time in establishing the type II conditioned reflex
under experimental conditions.
The next step in our experimentation was an attempt to establish the
type II conditioned reflex by using the passive lifting of the leg. The
rationale of this experiment was the assumption that the indispensable
condition for the formation of the type II conditioned reflex was that the
proprioception of the movement should become the type
I conditioned stimulus, that is, a signal of presentation of food. We turned on
an electric lamp placed in front of the stand, and then we raised Bobek's left foreleg by pulling a string attached to the
wrist;
this compound was reinforced by food, whereas the
lighting of the lamp without the passive movement was not reinforced. After a
short time Bobek began to actively raise his foreleg;
at the beginning he did it throughout the experimental session, and then only
in response to light.
Then by mere accident we discovered the following fact. When the band
for recording was attached to the left hind leg, Bobek
performed the movement of
JERZY
KONORSKI
189
that leg in response to both the tone and the lamp;
when the band was attached to the left foreleg, he raised that leg to both the
conditioned stimuli. When the band was attached to one of the right legs, no
movement was performed. We called this phenomenon "motor
generalization" and were very much impressed by this unexpected finding.
I shall not describe all the experiments we performed during the first
few months of our experimental work. We were very lucky with the dog, who was amazingly intelligent and learned very quickly all
the conditioned reflex tasks with which he was presented.
In order to hasten our experimental work we decided to train the dog in
two tasks simultaneously, one task involving alimentary conditioned reflexes
being trained in the morning, and the other involving defensive conditioned
reflexes being trained in the afternoon. The dog put up with all the
difficulties presented to him and seemed quite happy. Only once, when we
attempted to teach him to extend the hind leg in response to one stimulus in
order to avoid the electric shock, and to raise the same leg in response to another
stimulus in order to get food, did he refuse to work. Concurrently he developed
an interesting experimental neurosis: when placed on the stand, he took a
catatonic position, with his hind leg lifted continuously and his eyes half
closed. However, when we stopped this type of experiment, he soon returned to
normal.
Since at that time we did not consider it necessary to use more
dogs—in fact, the results obtained on Bobek
were most reliable and were repeated many times—we were able within a few
months to make many interesting discoveries concerning the properties of
particular varieties of type II conditioned reflexes. We were much impressed
when we came across a phenomenon now called "avoidance conditioning."
In accordance with our ideas we applied the following procedure: An auditory
stimulus alone (a whistle) was followed by a puff of air into the ear
(provoking a very strong defensive response), whereas this stimulus accompanied
by a passive movement of the right foreleg was not followed by the air puff. Bobek began to raise the foreleg to the sound of the
whistle and continued to do so consistently in spite of nonreinforcement.
After having obtained these first results we decided to do two things:
one was to present a report before the Warsaw Branch of the French Biological
Society in
The first two papers, concerning the elaboration of the type II
conditioned reflexes and their transfer, were delivered to the Society in the
summer of 1928. As I remember it, the reaction of the audience was quite
favorable, and after a few months these papers were published in Comptes Rendus de la Societe de Biologic et de ses Filiales (Miller and Konorski, 1928a, 1928b).
More or less at the same time, to our great joy, we received an answer
from Pavlov. He congratulated us on our results, took them to be important, and
asked for details. Thus we considered our first experimental season, which had
190 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
lasted only five months, to be fully successful. This
was just at the end of our fourth year of medical studies, and, to our great
annoyance, we had before us still one full year at the University.
When the new academic year began, our position was much strengthened. We
boasted of the letter received from Pavlov, and we also proudly displayed the
reprints of our papers to everyone. As a result, Professor Czubalski,
head of the chair of human physiology in the Medical Faculty of the
Since everything follows the rule of coming to its end, in the fall of
1929 we graduated in medicine and had to face the problem of finding jobs. This
was, at that time, far from easy in
In this way our practical problems were solved. We both received rather
decent salaries and apartments inside the hospital. We were allowed to build
and indeed were assisted in building, the laboratory of conditioned reflexes
(the third so far in our brief careers).
However, our work in this field did not progress, because we were at
that time so much concerned with psychiatry—a field quite new to
us—that it was practically impossible to perform systematic experiments
on conditioned reflexes. Even so, the knowledge of psychiatry which I
acquired during that time has remained with me and has occasionally been of
great help to me with regard to both my livelihood and my scientific work.
During our stay in Pruszkow we prepared a
monograph written in Polish in which we presented all our experimental results
on type II conditioned reflexes (Konorski and Miller,
1933). We claimed that these reflexes represent the
JERZY
KONORSKI
191
physiological model of voluntary behavior
and we considered that they possess a quite different mechanism from the Pavlovian (type I) conditioned reflexes.
In the meantime our contact with Pavlov was not broken and in one of his
letters he proposed that we should come to
At that time there was a true "iron curtain" between
Late in 1931 on a foggy November morning we boarded the train going to
the Soviet frontier, and then by a Soviet train we arrived in
IN
It would be both unreasonable and impossible to depict chronologically
my stay in
When Miller and I arrived in
Pavlov headed at that time two big laboratories situated in separate
districts of
192 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
glands had been performed, the studies rewarded by
the Nobel prize. In 1910 a
Pavlov spent alternate days in the two laboratories. Wednesdays were
free from experimental work, because before noon there were meetings of all
scientific workers of both laboratories to discuss the current experimental
work, and in the afternoons there were meetings in either psychoneurological
or psychiatric clinics directed by two of Pavlov's coworkers; here the
particularly interesting neurotic or psychiatric cases were analyzed and
discussed from the point of view of Pavlov's ideas about brain pathophysiology.
During the morning meetings Pavlov was usually the only speaker. He was
perfectly acquainted with the work of every one of his coworkers and presented
the material from memory without the use of notes. Indeed, his excellent memory
was famous and at the time that I was there—he was 82 years old—it
had not deteriorated. Usually, after talking for about 20 minutes he would ask
whether there were any questions or comments. Most often the discussion was
rather limited and only occasionally would an argument develop.
Rarely was Pavlov opposed. The criticism, which was very feeble, would
be circumlocuted by such phrases as: "How do you
explain, Ivan Petrovitch, this or that fact?"
Generally speaking, to openly criticize Pavlov was rather a shocking act and
required some courage. First, Pavlov himself was a very strong debater, quite
aggressive and not quite fair in discussion. Besides, if anybody dared to
criticize Pavlov, the entire group would side against the critic. In such a
situation, it was no wonder that Pavlov always prevailed. However, in spite of
this, Pavlov truly esteemed those people who did oppose him and he highly
respected the independence of one's views, as long as he did not consider them
to be nonsense. After arguing strongly and defending his own viewpoint, and
after cooling down, Pavlov would often accept the view of his opponent and
would openly admit that he had been wrong.
Every morning, after arriving in the laboratory, Pavlov would sit down
in a large open room, where everybody was free to join him. Most often people
came to him to report their new experimental results.Pavlov
listened attentively, then gave his comments and explanations of the data
obtained. Here people were much more free to take part
in the discussions than they were at the Wednesday meetings, and time and again
a hot argument about some problem broke out. These discussions were, of course,
exceedingly interesting, because of their
JERZY
KONORSKI
193
informal character, and therefore I
always attended them when I had finished my daily experiments.
In general, Pavlov was the "spiritus movens" of the work going on in his two laboratories.
He assigned the problems to be worked out to each of his co-workers and he
controlled all the stages of their research. Only in exceptional cases did a
student follow his own line of research, but then it was rather difficult to
win Pavlov's attention and appreciation.
From this description it is clear that scientific and intellectual life
in the Pavlovian laboratories was very vigorous and
that it was fully concentrated around Pavlov. In the absence of Pavlov we
usually talked about him, quoted what he said, how he behaved, etc. Moreover,
there was clear jealousy among Pavlov's pupils about who was the closest to
him. People boasted when Pavlov spoke to them at some length, and, as a matter
of fact, the attitude of Pavlov toward an individual was the main factor
determining the hierarchy within the group. Another characteristic of
"Pavlov's pupils" was that, although squabbling among themselves,
they were united with regard to other scientific groups, having a feeling of
superiority and self-importance. Of course, I fully shared this feeling. To sum
up, the atmosphere reigning in the group reminded one of that usually
encountered in royal courts, with Pavlov being the indisputable king.
Since the general character of the experimental work carried out in the Pavlovian laboratories is not well known by American
psychologists, I shall briefly describe it:
Each member of the laboratory had several dogs (from 3 to 8) on which he
performed his experiments. Usually the dogs remained in the laboratory for many
years and they were trained in a great number of experimental tasks, all of
them in classical salivary conditioned reflexes.
The routine of the experimental procedure was very rigid and essentially
the same in the whole laboratory. Every day, except Sundays and Wednesdays, the
animals were brought to the chambers from the animal house at exactly the same
hour. All the dogs had fistulas of one parotic gland,
which enabled measurement of salivary responses. Usually, when a dog was
brought to the chamber, he jumped immediately on the stand and a small glass
capsule was sealed to his cheek by the experimenter at the place of the fistula
with a special sealing wax (whose formula was given by the great Mendeleev). The capsule was connected with a thin
horizontal glass tube situated in front of the experimenter and filled with
colored fluid. When the dog salivated, the meniscus of the fluid moved and thus
salivation, in response both to the conditioned stimuli and to the
unconditioned stimulus, was recorded. The reinforcement used in all experiments
was prepared for the whole laboratory. It consisted of a powder made from
minced crackers and minced boiled meat. Before a session the experimenter
mixed the two powders in equal proportion and added a given portion of water.
In this way, the powder had a consistency of moist sand and was easily chewed
and swallowed by the animal, producing copious salivation. The constant
portions of this cracker-meat powder were distributed in even quantities to
194 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
the bowls, situated along the round disc mounted
in the feeder and with one aperture just in front of the dog. By pneumatic
control, the experimenter put a bowl with food into position so that the food
was available to the animal. The act of eating lasted about 20 to 30 seconds.
Experimental sessions consisted of 6-10 trials separated by intertrial intervals of about 5 minutes each. In most
experiments performed at this time the intertrial
intervals were always the same in the given series of experiments.
The conditioned stimuli were auditory (the sound of a metronome, tones,
the sound of bubbling water, whistles, buzzing, etc.), visual (continuous or
rhythmic light, rotating or oscillating objects, etc.), and tactile (a small
gadget was attached to the skin in such a way that by pneumatic control the
experimenter was able to produce tactile stimuli). In well-trained animals
the operation of a conditioned stimulus preceded the presentation of food by
20-30 seconds, so that the experimenter could record the rate of conditioned
salivation over a relatively long time span. Besides the positive conditioned
stimuli, negative conditioned stimuli were also used. These were similar to the
positive stimuli but presented without food reinforcement: for instance, the
sound of a metronome of different frequency, the tactile stimulus applied to
another place of the body, and light of another intensity
were among those used as negative stimuli. The training, consisting of the
presentation of positive (reinforced) and negative (nonreinforced)
stimuli, was called differentiation. Usually in experiments with each dog
various conditioned stimuli, both positive and negative, were used. It should
be noted that according to the habits of the laboratory, the negative stimuli
were presented only once or twice per session, because it was found that if
they were presented too often, the magnitudes of the positive conditioned
reflexes became less regular.
Each experimental session usually lasted 30-45 minutes. At the end of
the session a boy came to the chamber, took the animal out, and brought in the
next one. In the animal house the dogs were fed at definite hours with fixed
portions of cereal with bones. This highly stereotyped way of conducting
experiments resulted in amazingly constant and stable responses to each of the
conditioned stimuli and amazingly stereotyped behavior of the animals during
the sessions.
When Miller and I began our work on type II conditioned reflexes in
Pavlov's laboratory, we had to modify the stable routine. A number of arrangements
had to be made to teach the animals to lift their legs in response to
conditioned stimuli, to register their motor responses, and so forth.
We got five dogs, which had previously served for many experimental
studies. We received their entire biographies, their age, the dates of their
coming to the laboratory, the whole story of their conditioned reflex careers,
and the lists of all positive and negative conditioned stimuli used in their
training. Accordingly, what we had to do was to introduce some new stimuli and
train the animals in type II conditioning.
The work in the Pavlovian laboratory was of
utmost importance for me and certainly determined my entire future. Whereas our
work on conditioning
JERZY
KONORSKI 195
performed in
Beside this, I had the opportunity to get thoroughly acquainted with the
whole bulk of the past and the present work on conditioned reflexes and thus to
become a well-trained specialist in this field.
What were the main achievements during my stay in
To end this description of my almost two years' stay in
It should be noted that this negative attitude of Pavlov toward the
specificity of type II conditioned reflexes had a detrimental effect on
the development of the study of these reflexes in
196 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
ever, when the greatest authority in this field
stated that type II conditioned reflexes simply do not exist, this was decisive
and meant special investigations along this line, with insignificant
exceptions, were not undertaken in
BACK IN
In June 1933, there came a day when I packed all my
luggage, consisting mainly of books, journals, and experimental materials, and
returned to
Strangely enough, the problem of my future was decided the second day
after my arrival in
From our first talk I learned that after returning from
A few days later, Lubinska brought Miller and
me to Bialaszewicz and we discussed with him the
possibility of establishing a small laboratory of conditioned reflexes in
his department. He gave his consent and offered us a room suitable for our
experiments. Thus, in the fall of 1933 two important events occurred in my
life. I established the laboratory on conditioned reflexes in the Nencki Institute, and Dr. Lubinska
became my wife.
JERZY
KONORSKI
197
From the scientific point of view my collaboration with Lubinska was for me extremely valuable. As a matter of
fact, from the very beginning of my scientific career I had engaged myself in
the study of conditioned reflexes. However, my general knowledge of neuro physiology was very poor. On the other hand, Lubinska had an excellent knowledge in this field, having
worked for a number of years in one of the best known centers of
neurophysiology in
This circumstance was decisive for the further development of my scientific
ideas. During the time I worked in Pavlov's laboratory I was under the spell of
his ideas and personality. In spite of my argument with him about type II
conditioned reflexes, in all other respects I supported his views and was
strongly convinced of the soundness of his ideas concerning the activity of the
cerebral cortex. After my return to
However, as I had learned more about Sherringtonian
neurophysiology, I realized that the views of these two scientists were
completely incompatible. According to Pavlov the general picture of the
activity of the cerebral cortex was roughly the following: Excitatory and
inhibitory processes are assumed to arise in particular "points" of
the cortex as the effects of excitatory and inhibitory conditioned stimuli.
Both these processes spread in a wavelike manner over the cortex, affecting
larger or smaller areas, and mutually restrict each other. The
greater the areas of the excitatory processes, the stronger the predominance of
excitation over inhibition; the larger the areas of the inhibitory processes,
the stronger the dominance of inhibition. If the inhibitory process
spreads all over the cortex and subcortical centers,
it gives rise to sleep. Often the excitatory area is surrounded by the
inhibitory area, the phenomenon called by Pavlov negative induction; or vice
versa, the inhibitory focus is surrounded by excitatory fields, the phenomenon
denoted as positive induction. Pavlov imagined that the perpetual
interplay between the excitatory and inhibitory processes was the essence of
the normal activity of the brain—in other words, of the mental processes
occurring in a subject. If there is a conflict between excitatory and inhibitory
processes tending to occupy the same place in the cortex, then the pathological
state called neurosis issues. All the experimental results obtained in Pavlov's
laboratories on dogs, as well as observations of human patients in psychoneuro-logical and psychiatric clinics controlled by
Pavlov, were explained by reference to the above theory.
The Sherringtonian idea concerning the
functioning of the nervous processes was entirely different. It was based on
the neuronal theory of the structure of the central nervous system advanced by
Ramon y Cajal in his monumental work. According to
this theory, the conveyance of nervous processes is always unidirectional,
leading from the cell body through the axon to other neurons. Sherrington has shown that the nervous impulses arriving
along an axon to a given neuron can either activate the
neuron and cause it to discharge, or inhibit it, tli.it
is, block energy brought to it through other axons. Accordingly, each
198 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
neuron is a convergence point of both excitatory and
inhibitory influences, which determine the intensity of discharges produced by
this neuron and which in turn are conveyed by axons to other neurons.
It was quite clear to me that the Pavlovian
and Sherringtonian concepts of the functioning of the
nervous system could not be reconciled with each other, and it was even
impossible to find a "dictionary" which would translate one set of
notions into the other. Simply, one of the two theories should be rejected in toto, and the facts so far explained by the rejected theory
should be reinterpreted in the framework of the other theory.
By that time I already had no doubt that it was Pavlov's theory that
should be rejected. The more I pondered Pavlovian
explanations of various facts in the field of conditioned reflexes and tried to
analyze the explanations, the more I discovered inconsistencies and
contradictions in the Pavlovian interpretation of the
facts. Thus, the idea grew in my mind to try to explain the whole bulk of
experimental work collected by Pavlov's school by the Sherringtonian
principles of functioning of the central nervous system.
Besides this theoretical work undertaken during that period, I was
intensely involved in experimental work on conditioned reflexes carried out in
collaboration with Lubinska and Miller.
Unfortunately, most of this work was performed before the war and the
experimental material was lost. Perhaps the most important published work was
that concerned with the problem of interrelations between alimentary and
defensive type II conditioned reflexes. The procedure of these experiments was
that, using dogs, type II conditioned reflexes, both alimentary and defensive,
were established. Raising the foreleg was the alimentary type II response,
and raising the hindleg was the type II defensive
response (active avoidance). It was shown that the animals never exchange the
defensive response for the alimentary one, and vice versa. On the other hand,
when the animal was trained to perform two different movements in response to
two different stimuli, both under
food reinforcement, exchange of these responses occurred quite often. This work
was published in Polish just before the war in a practically unknown scientific
journal (Konorski, 1939).
It should perhaps be noted that during this time Miller and I became
involved in an interesting discussion with Skinner. In 1935 Skinner published a
paper entitled "Two Types of Conditioned Reflex and a Pseudo-type"
(Skinner, 1935). In this paper he developed ideas somewhat similar to ours,
showing the existence of two types of conditioned responses. Skinner called
these type I and type II, but his type I was what we called type II, and vice
versa. (Only later did he introduce the terms "respondent behavior"
and "operant behavior," which are now in common usage.) It was
because we did not agree with his approach to the problem of distinguishing
between the two types of responses that this discussion developed (Konorski and Miller, 1937b; Skinner, 1937; Konorski and Miller, 1937a).
This discussion seems to me to be not quite obsolete. Skinner performed
experiments based on his now well-known experimental procedure (the
"Skinner
JERZY
KONORSKI
199
box"). A rat was introduced into a box with a
lever; time and again among his other activities the animal pressed the lever,
and this was followed by presentation of food. As a result the animal
learned to perform lever pressings with maximal frequency. Accordingly, Skinner
considered that the formation of the operant responses consisted in the
increase of probability of the
performance of that movement. Since Miller and I worked with a quite different
technique, in which we evoked a given movement either by passive flexion or by
electrical stimulation of the paw, we argued that Skinner's explanation could
not hold, because the probability of the performance of the movement of the
animal before it was trained is in our experimental situation simply zero.
These were my main scientific activities in the thirties. They were
abruptly cut short on
THE WAR (1939-1945)
I don't think it would be sensible to attempt to describe the days of
the beginning of the War, which I remember very vividly and in great detail.
The panic of the population, the smell and sight of the fires, the rapid advance
of the German Army toward Warsaw—in five days they were already at the
outskirts of the city—the bombardment by artillery of the Nencki Institute, which was situated on the western
outskirts of Warsaw and which the Germans wrongly took for the military
building situated in the vicinity, the gradual deterioration of Warsaw when the
water supply, the electric power, the transport and finally the telephone
contacts were extinguished—all this is beyond the scope of this
narrative, which is supposed to be a scientific autobiography. Our only
scientific occupation during that time was directed to carrying scientific
books, reprints, experimental materials from one place to another, according to
which place seemed to us for some reason most secure.
After a three-week siege of Warsaw, during which a heroic resistance was
maintained in spite of the complete dominance of the Germans in the air and on
land, the municipal authority decided that further resistance was absurd and
the city surrendered. In the first months of occupation our main task was to
put our scientific materials in order. In particular, since I had already
written a few chapters of my prospective book on conditioned reflexes, we tried
to type them in several copies in order to save them from destruction. The days
in October and November were already short, and since there was no electricity
we brought home accumulators from the laboratory; and this was the source of
our light, which had, of course, to be maximally economized.
In October or November we received information from
200 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
come to
Since we had to remain in
The helpfulness of my colleagues in
The chief aim of the Primate Biological Station in
I decided to continue my work on type II conditioned reflexes, now
utilizing monkeys instead of dogs. I had two good soundproof chambers and I
equipped them with several instruments which played the role of manipulanda. There were levers to be pressed, chains to be
pulled, buttons to be pushed. The animals were trained to perform various
responses to various conditioned stimuli, or to establish chain conditioned
reflexes, in which the responses had to be performed in a definite sequence.
Our relatively quiet life, disturbed only by our worrying about the fate
of our friends, came abruptly to an end on
JERZY
KONORSKI
201
We understood at once that the continuation of our work along the same
line would be completely inappropriate and we decided to work in the field,
which might be of some value for practical war medicine. Accordingly, some
quite new projects were begun, namely studies of traumatic neuroses and their
treatment, and of nerve regeneration after the cutting of nerves, performed on
dogs and monkeys. On the last topic we discovered that nerve regeneration
occurs much faster than had so far been supposed (3 to 4 mm/day, not 1 mm), and
that it is easy to find the tips of the regenerating fibers because of their
strongly increased mechanical excitability (responses to very light hitting).
Although there were no apparent changes in our life at the beginning of
the War, gradually the situation became more and more distressing. The swift
victories of the German Blitzkrieg were most depressing, many young men from
the Station were mobilized, and the economic situation went rapidly from bad to
worse. There was a period when the German Army was quite near
Again I shall leave out the description of my most variegated
experiences during this difficult time, when the fate of Soviet Russia and the
whole world was at stake. I would only like to emphasize the most admirable
attitude of the Soviet population and the Soviet Army during this difficult
period. There was no tendency to panic in spite of the most dangerous
situation, and the people's patience was infinite. I heard many stories about
the extraordinary endurance of the Soviet soldiers, and I could confirm these
from my contacts with them in the hospital. It was most amazing to see how the
Soviet nation, which seemed to be on the verge of disaster, found enough moral
strength to transform the impending defeat into victory. I think that only
those who witnessed this transformation can properly appreciate it and
give it full credit.
The first spark of hope was when, quite unexpectedly for all of us, in
the middle of defeats the Soviet Army began a tremendous offensive at
In the spring of 1945 we decided to end our stay in
202 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Dembowski, one of the previous directors of the Nencki
Institute. After much deliberation we decided to restore
the Institute. At the end of August we returned by Soviet train through
FIRST POSTWAR PERIOD (1945-195 5): IN
The return to
The first people whom we met were Dr. and Mrs. Niemierko,
our old friends who before the war had worked in the Nencki
Institute. Again we discussed together the problem of our future and decided
that the Nencki Institute should be reestablished.
With this project we went to the Ministry of Education, where we saw the director
of the newly created Department of Science, Professor Arnold, a well-known
Polish historian, and presented our plan to him. In half an hour the plan was
accepted and two friendly couples, my wife and I and Dr. Niemierko
and his wife, formed the organizational committee of the Nencki
Institute. We chose Dr. Niemierko as chairman of the
committee. Our decision was immediately accepted by the Minister of Education,
Mr. Wycech, who signed the appropriate certificates.
It is curious to note how quickly every new idea could be materialized at that
time, because there existed no bureaucracy which could delay and hamper any new
project, at best, or cancel it, at worst.
Since
Soon
we visited the city governor, who was very pleased to know that well-known
scientific institute would be placed in
JERZY
KONORSKI
203
before the War Lodz was
only an industrial city; and it was a sort of Cinderella with regard to
cultural life. The new authorities of
The governor of
In 1947 the Institute was ready to begin experimental work. It consisted
of three main departments: the Department of Biology, whose head was Professor Dembowski following his return from
I shall leave out a description of the seemingly insurmountable
difficulties connected with the organization of our Institute. We had to work
in a complete vacuum, having no equipment, no trained staff, and even no
furniture. Still, however extraordinary our deed seems to me now, this was
quite typical and usual for that time; everybody was confronted with the same
situation. One cannot imagine the enthusiasm which at that time animated the
Polish intelligentsia. There were no bureaucratic obstacles and
limitations, and through energy and dedication one could bring every project
into existence.
The difficulty of our situation was that between our generation (people
from 45 to 60) and very young people (about 20 years of age) there was a
generation gap, because most of the people who would then have been about 30
had been killed during the war or in the Warsaw uprising. Accordingly, when
assembling the scientific staff, we simply took people who were in their first
year of university studies. We were their teachers in the University and their
bosses in the Institute. It was not usual that they were starting their
scientific career so early, but there was no other choice. We were so anxious
to begin our work that we had to expose our young colleagues to a not quite
correct order of education.
It should be added that these people did overcome successfully these
disadvantages and became highly competent scientific workers. Most of them have
remained in the Institute and are working in it at present. After a short time
a few previous workers of the Institute joined us, and this group came to
constitute the core of its staff.
Returning now to my own history, it ran as follows: After I returned
from
204 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
reflexes. Having these materials now
at hand and having my ideas completely ripe, there was no great difficulty for
me in organizing them, and in less than one year the Polish manuscript of the
book was ready. I entered into correspondence with Dr. Waddington in
Since Mr. Garry was not a specialist in the field concerned, all of the
technical translation rested with me, while his duty was to shape the sentences
and phrases properly. Accordingly I spend most of my time in the libraries to
learn technical English expressions from the books on conditioned reflexes.
During that time I became so thoroughly acquainted with the terminology and
idioms used in this field that since then I have been able to write all my
publications directly in English, perhaps not quite correctly, but without
special difficulty.
After four months of hard work, the translation was completed and submitted
to Dr. Waddington. It appeared that it was indeed quite good, and only a few
corrections were made by scientists who kindly read the typescript.
The book was published in 1948 by the Cambridge University Press. Its
title was Conditioned Reflexes and Neuron
Organization (Konorski, 1948). Its reviews
were generally favorable, although living in
Quite different was the attitude toward my book in Soviet Russia. After
a big conference in
JERZY
KONORSKI
205
position in my own country. In spite
of the difficult situation for our laboratory produced by this circumstance,
our research work developed normally and we did not yield to any demands we
were asked to fulfill.
While we were in
Perhaps the most important accomplishment in the former field of
investigation was a radical change of my views on internal inhibition,
caused by completely unexpected results of our experiments (Konorski and Szwejkowska, 1950,
1956). The concept, put forward in my monograph of 1948, asserted that internal
inhibition arising in the course of extinction of differentiation of
conditioned reflexes was a synaptic process, and that inhibitory conditioned
reflexes are due to the inhibitory synapses being formed between the center of
the conditioned stimulus and the center of the unconditioned stimulus. These inhibitory
synapses were supposed to grow side by side with excitatory synapses, so the
inhibitory reflex was considered to be in essence an excitatory-inhibitory
reflex, because the connections between the two centers were considered to be
both excitatory and inhibitory. It was further assumed that inhibitory connections
develop because of the prior existence of excitatory connections; accordingly,
the strength of the inhibitory conditioned reflex was thought to be positively
correlated with the strength of the excitatory reflex from which it was formed.
However, to my great amazement, the results of our new experiments were just
the reverse: it turned out that the stronger was the original excitatory reflex
to a given conditioned stimulus, the weaker was the inhibitory reflex produced
by that stimulus when it was not reinforced. In other words, the inhibitory
connections were not enhanced, but prevented, from growing, when the excitatory
connections were already there. Conversely, the strongest inhibitory
conditioned reflex as judged by the difficulty of its transformation to the
excitatory reflex, was established when a given stimulus from the very
beginning of its presentation was not reinforced by the unconditioned stimulus.
Of course, this finding compelled me to change radically my view on internal
inhibition.
The second line of research, no less important than the first, was the
study of the mechanism of instrumental (type II) conditioning. The first
achievement in this study was the new paradigm of this conditioning proposed by
Wyrwicka (1952). On the basis of her experiments she
came to the conclusion that there are double connections linking the
"center" of the conditioned stimulus with the "center" of
the instrumental motor act. On the one hand, there are indirect connections
running through the center of the unconditioned stimulus—in the case of
alimentary conditioning, through the food center. On the other hand, there are
direct connections linking the two centers. Both kinds of connections
206 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
must work together in order that the instrumental
conditioned reflex be produced. It has been shown that many experimental
facts from the field of instrumental conditioning can be explained well by
reference to this model.
In this period a new field of investigation was also opened up in our
laboratory. I felt very strongly that we should broaden our research work by
studying the functional organization of the cerebral cortex, using ablation
techniques on animals trained in various types of conditioning. Unfortunately,
I had never had the opportunity to learn neurosurgery. But again we were lucky,
because a prominent Polish neurosurgeon, Dr. Lucjan Stepien, became strongly interested in our scientific work,
and joined us. As a matter of fact, he taught brain surgery to the entire
group, and he raised this important technique to a high level of performance in
our laboratory.
The first study performed in this field was concerned with ablations of
the prefrontal area of the cortex. The main reason for entering on this problem
proved to be quite erroneous. I was disappointed by the fact that our dogs were
too "clever" and would not behave like conditioned reflex machines,
responding automatically to our stimuli, in a regular and predictable manner.
On the contrary, quite often they reacted inappropriately or not at all to a
given conditioned stimulus, according to its actual significance. Instead they
responded to more sophisticated cues, based on the whole stereotype of the
conditioned reflex sessions, which enabled them to determine whether the next
stimulus would be positive or negative. Therefore, I thought that the
prefrontal area might just be responsible for this higher order of behavior and
that, when we removed this area, the animal would become a conditioned reflex
automaton similar to the spinal reflex automaton obtained after decerebration in Sherring-tonian
experiments.
This hypothesis was not confirmed; instead, we discovered the important
fact that after prefrontal lesions, the inhibitory conditioned reflexes are
strongly disinhibited while the excitatory reflexes
remain unchanged. This finding was afterward examined in great detail and many
experimental studies were performed to elucidate the mechanism of this
phenomenon (Brutkowski et al., 1956).
Another project developed during this period was concerned with the role
of the motor area in instrumental responding. The working hypothesis was that
this area was a "site" of instrumental responses and that after its
ablation these responses should be abolished.
This prediction again appeared to be wrong, because although the instrumental
responses were usually impaired, or
even absent after the operation, they were always recovered after some period
of time without any additional training. Since we thought
that this spontaneous recovery was due to the small extent of the lesions.
We performed several operations on one subject in succession. All these
operations, in general, did impair to a greater or lesser degree the performance of the movement, but
failed to abolish the movement as a behavioral act. In
JERZY
KONORSKI
207
plain language, the animal knew what he had to do, in spite of the fact that the execution of
the movement was deficient (Stepien et al., 1961).
In this period I also became interested in the effects of lesions of the
cerebral cortex in humans. Here the cooperation with Professor Stepien appeared to be extraordinarily fruitful. We
became particularly interested in the problem of aphasia and we made an attempt
to establish a classification of speech disorders on the basis of localization
of lesions in the cerebral cortex. This work was further developed and extended
after we moved back to
SECOND POSTWAR PERIOD (1956-1970):
BACK IN
There are at least two reasons why I can divide my postwar life into two
distinct periods, with the demarcation point being 1955. First, 1955 was the
year in which, two years after Stalin's death, the "thaw" began, when
Khrushchev came into power in the
By the way, the change which occurred then turned out to be permanent;
we were no longer taught and instructed by incompetent persons as to what was
and what was not correct in our thinking, and the atmosphere in science became
quite normal. Whereas in the Stalinist period we were completely cut off from
Western scientists, this barrier was now removed.
The second big change which occurred in 1955 lay in the fact that in
that year our Institute was transferred from
208 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Although it was because of Dembowski that the
Institute was moved back to Warsaw, the main burden of making detailed plans
for the transfer fell again to the Niemierkos, my
wife, and myself. The difficulty of the job was that the type of building best
suited to our needs was relatively new in postwar
Generally speaking, the Institute was in many respects first class.
Among other things, my Department possessed ten soundproof chambers for the
experiments on conditioning in dogs, operation rooms for neurosurgery
(planned by Professor Stepien), and a large animal
house for animals subjected to recurrent experiments. I consider all these
details to be a part of my autobiography, because truly every detail was
planned or accepted by me. I can boast that the Department of Neurophysiology,
with all its virtues and defects, is my own child.
Another important event, both for me and for 'our Department, was that
very soon I was sent forth by the Polish Academy of Sciences to visit the
United States for several months to become acquainted with scientific centers
concerned with brain research. My visit came into being at the end of 1957
and was successful owing to one man, to whom I will remain grateful all my
life. This man was Robert (Bob)
I left
Although from that time on I was a very frequent visitor in
JERZY
KONORSKI
209
My first impression was that of a most efficient organization of my trip
and the great hospitality of my hosts. In each place I had a host who met me at
the airport and took care of me during the period of my stay. As a matter of
fact, I was the first scientist concerned with brain research to visit this
country from
Second, to my great amazement and pleasure I learned that I was not
unknown in the
Third, what I had expected was that most people whom I had to meet would
be Skinnerian, and that consequently I would not find a common scientific
language with them. I expected that people would argue bitterly with me and
would not acknowledge the physiological approach to behavioral phenomena, the
approach I represented. This again was not true. I had not realized what a
great change had occurred in
This being so, it was not surprising that my visits in various places
immediately led to establishing close friendly relations with the people I
met, at first scientific and then also personal. These relations turned out to
be long-lasting, since they have remained up to the present time and have
become even closer.
I was also happy to learn that in spite of the great distance between
This first visit of mine to
If the exchange of scientific information can be regarded as some sort
of "intellectual market" in which the intellectual goods representing
the results of
210 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
research are sold and purchased, our
laboratory—to my great satisfaction—was included in this market,
and thus the long period of isolation came to an end.
Of course, the new political period, which began in 1956 and was
characterized by the end of the Cold War, enabled the establishment of
scientific relations not only with the
There was also great improvement in the relations between our group and
the scientists of the Eastern countries. In the previous period, these
relations had been practically nonexistent, because of their boycott of me,
which extended to my whole laboratory. Truly, the boycott was rather
advantageous for me, because I could avoid pseudo-scientific discussions, which
were characteristic for that period and had a rather negative effect on the
development of the younger generation.
Now the attitude of Soviet scientists toward me changed almost
overnight. They became friendly and began to invite an improvement in our
relations, feeling that bygones should be bygones.
As a
result of this change of atmosphere, three laboratories dealing with the
physiology of the central nervous system—the Institute of Higher Nervous
Activity and Neuro physiology of the Soviet Academy
of Sciences, headed by Professor Asratian; the Institut of Physiology of the Czechoslovak Academy of
Sciences, represented by Dr. Gutmann, and our
laboratory—decided to arrange a common symposium, which was held in Poland
in 1959.
This symposium was a great success, both scientifically and socially. We
learned that there are in these other two institutes very nice and valuable
workers in science. Friendship between the laboratories became stable, and we
arranged similar symposia thereafter every three or four years.
Returning to our relations with
The reason I say so much about the life of our laboratory is that all
these things are a part of my autobiography and inseparable from it.
Owing to my frequent visits to the
JERZY
KONORSKI
211
point of view, it does not matter at all who has
made a given discovery; still it does matter to the person who made it.
Although for a scientist the esteem and recognition of his colleagues do not
play a decisive role in his endeavors, nevertheless they cannot be ignored.
Accordingly, if somebody makes a discovery which he considers important
but which is overlooked by other specialists, he feels frustrated. But he
is even more unhappy if he was the first
who did it, yet the discovery is ascribed to someone else. I think that these
feelings are deeply rooted in all of us, and I would be astonished to find
anyone lacking them. When Stefan Miller and I discovered that our conditioned
reflexes of the second type were different phenomena from Pavlovian
conditioned reflexes, we fully realized that this was an important discovery
and clearly saw the vast perspectives which were opened up by the introduction
of these phenomena into conditioned reflex studies. Since we were not in the
center of the scientific market but on its periphery, and since we had
published only a few papers in the prewar period in French or English, we
considered it quite natural that we were unknown. Then the war broke out and
our original work would have been even more forgotten. The fact that it was
not, and that my monograph Conditioned
Reflexes and Neuron Organization did find appreciation among American scientists,
gave me great satisfaction. The only regret was that Stefan Miller died
prematurely and did not live to see this appreciation.
Since the transfer of our Institute from
The scope of research dealt with in our department has been considerably
extended in comparison with the preceding period. I shall present here briefly
only those lines of research in which I was directly involved and which have
contributed to the further development of my own ideas.
In the studies concerning the mechanisms of instrumental conditioning,
the important discovery was made by Gorska and Jankowska (1961) to the effect that deafferentation
of the limb involved in a previously trained response does not abolish that
response; this means that the proprioceptive feedback
of the limb performing a given acquired movement is not indispensable for the
execution of that movement. This result clearly contradicts the theory of
type II conditioning, originally advanced by Miller and myself, according to
which this type of conditioning if fully dependent on the proprioceptive
feedback.
Another important result was obtained by Tarnecki
(1962), who has shown that a movement of the hind leg elicited by stimulation
of the motor cortex, followed by food reinforcement, cannot be transformed into
an instrumental response, whereas a movement elicited by the sensory cortex
can. The analysis
212 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
of this fact, together with some other data, has
led to the conclusion that only movements elicited by the afferent input
(including stimulation of the sensory cortex) can be instrumentally
conditioned.
Finally, the experiments of Ellison and Konorski
(1965) have shown that the alimentary instrumental response (or rather its kinesthesis) does not necessarily elicit the salivary
response as was postulated by our original theory of instrumental conditioning.
These facts have considerably clarified my ideas concerning the
mechanisms of instrumental responding. Another group of findings helped me to
better understand the organization of central mechanisms of conditioned
reflexes in general. Here belong the results of the experiments on the
hypothalamus and the amygdala performed by Wyrwicka (Wyrwicka et al., 1960)
and Fonberg (1967, 1969), which allowed me to
distinguish two parallel systems determining the animal’s behavior: the thalamo-cortical system on the one hand and the hypo-thalamo-amygdalar system on the other.
All these facts—combined with the most daring idea advanced by Soltysik, claiming that consummatory
food conditioned responses (mediated by the thalamo-cortical
system) inhibit instrumental responses produced by the hunger drive and
mediated by the hypothalamo-amygdalar
system—led to a new view of the mechanisms of conditioning. This view is
much different both from my previous concepts and from the concepts advanced by
other investigators.
The other line of inquiry begun in the preceding period, namely the
study of the functional organization of various regions of the cerebral cortex,
also gained new impetus. The most important task consisted in the analysis of
the effects of partial prefrontal lesions upon animal behavior. It was found
that disinhibition of negative conditioned reflexes
and impairment of delayed responses (which was studied in our laboratory
in great detail by Lawicka on dogs and cats) depend
on different prefrontal areas (Brutkowski and Dabrowska, 1966 Lawicka et al.,
1966).
To conclude this very short report on the development of some of our
investigations over the last fifteen years, I should mention the continuation
of our studies on the effects of focal cerebral lesions on the behavior of
patients, undertaken with Professor Lucjan Stepien and his group in the neurosurgical hospital. We
concentrated on the problem of speech disorders and came to definite
conclusions concerning the pathophysiology of various
forms of aphasia. The reader interested in this problem should consult my
recent paper on this subject (Konorski, 1970).
From all these bits of evidence a coherent picture of integrative
cerebral activity began to crystallize, a picture which allowed me to
understand a great number of data both in the field of behavioral studies of
animals and in the field of human psychology. The principle cementing this
knowledge and providing the foundation for the architecture of cortical
activity was deduced or rather extrapolated, from the important discoveries
made in recent years in the physiology of perceptual processes. Here
belong in the first place the studies of Hubel and Wiesel concerning visual perception. According to these
studies, visual
JERZY
KONORSKI
213
stimulus patterns are represented in
the cerebral cortex, not by complex assemblies of neurons, as postulated
earlier by Hebb, but by individual neurons which
react selectively to a given pattern. This selectivity is achieved by the
principle of convergence, by which the elements of the given pattern are
addressed to a given neuron, and lateral inhibition, by which the foreign
elements of the pattern are filtered out. One step from these findings leads to
the hypothesis that all "unitary perceptions" of the natural stimulus
objects of various modalities (known visual objects, sounds, smells, etc.) are
represented by separate units in the "associative" or "gnostic" cortical fields. In this way we obtain a
general model for perceptual processes, while the interconnections between the
units of various gnostic fields provide a basis for
associations between various experiences.
After having arrived at all these ideas I felt that it would be
reasonable to present them systematically in a special monograph. The decision
whether to undertake this task or not was far from easy. On the one hand, I had
a strong temptation to do so, according to a general shortcoming of human
nature, so well expressed by Bernard Shaw, who said: "When a man has
anything to tell in this world, the difficulty is not to make him tell it, but
to prevent him from telling it too often" (Caesar and Cleopatra). On the
other hand, since I was already over sixty, I was simply afraid I might not be
able to fulfill such a difficult task, requiring a tremendous mental effort, a
good memory (which was clearly deteriorating in me), and great powers of
concentration. The decision was made even more difficult by taking into account
my numerous duties, both scientific and administrative, connected with the
running of the Nencki Institute and my own
laboratory.
In the midst of these hesitations I received unexpectedly a letter from
the
I worked on this book for three and a half years, having many ups and
downs, many moments when I was elated and full of enthusiasm, and other moments
when I was completely broken and strongly blamed myself for having decided to
undertake this job. Certainly, the work was
too difficult for me, and there were periods when I was completely exhausted.
The difficulty was even greater because the book was written directly in
English, and time and again the proper formulation of my ideas presented great
difficulties. But I clearly realized that writing in Polish and then
translating into English would be even more difficult and unsatisfactory,
because of the great differences in the idioms of these two languages.
Finally, in the summer of 1966, the book was completed, and the
typescript was submitted to the Press. In about one year the book was published
(Konorski, 1967).
214 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Contrary to my expectations the reaction to the book was rather poor. I
had a feeling that many of my friends and colleagues simply disliked it, or had
not read it, or even did not know about it, because its advertising was inadequate.
I had an impression that with a few manifest exceptions, the book was received
coldly or even in an unfriendly way.
What I think about the book now is this. I consider, just as I
considered when I was writing it, that the book is good and important. Some of
my hypotheses have proved to be either inadequate or wrong, but this shows that
they were good starting points for further experimentation. This was, for
instance, the fate of my hypothesis concerning the mechanism of the cerebellar function as presented in the book. Starting from
this hypothesis I began with Tarnecki experiments on
the cerebellum which showed that my previous concept was wrong, but these
experiments did lead us to a solution of the problem which seems to be correct
(see Konorski and Tarnecki,
1970). On the other hand, other hypotheses which were quite daring when I
proposed them seem now to be confirmed. This would apply to my idea on the gnostic units (Charles Gross, personal communication), or
my idea about two types of units in the lateral hypothalamus responsible for
hunger and the taste of food, respectively (Gallistel
et al., 1969).
The great drawback of the book is that it is too concise, since within
one volume I have condensed material which should be presented in two separate
volumes. This makes the book difficult and requires very attentive reading and
rereading. I was also told by my colleagues that some paragraphs are not
sufficiently clear.
I am very curious to know what will be the final fate of the book: will
it eventually win general recognition, which I think it deserves in spite of
its shortcomings, or will it have no important impact on the further
development of behavioral sciences. I am rather afraid that the latter fate may
prevail because the investigations concerning the mechanisms of conditioning
are still in the hands of experimental psychologists, who simply do not care
about the physiological interpretation of the phenomena of animal behavior
and have quite different frames of reference from those applied in my book.
I am now approaching the end of my scientific biography. You have seen
that it began almost fifty years ago, when I first asked myself the question:
How does the brain work? The question was general, because my knowledge was nil,
but it was not naive, because I knew very well what I had in mind.
At first I was completely in the dark, because I failed to come across
those sources in which this question had already been coped with. The first
beam of light came to me from Pavlov's work, which stimulated me to begin
studies on this subject myself, in close cooperation with Stefan Miller. We
thought at that time that by specifying and defining all types of conditioned reflexes, the answer to our question would
be found. That is why we called the conditioned reflexes we studied type II,
hoping that afterward we should discover conditioned reflexes type III, type
IV, and so on.
JERZY
KONORSKI
215
When
through Lubinska I came across the Sherringtonian physiology of the nervous system based on
Ramon y Cajal's notion of its anatomical
organization, it was possible to project the studies on conditioned reflexes
upon the actual network of the brain. I accomplished this task by writing my
earlier monograph (Konorski, 1948). Thereafter came
twenty-five years of investigation in our postwar laboratory, during which time
the scope of our work grew immensely, and I became acquainted with the effects
of cerebral lesions not only in animals but also in men. This allowed me to
make a new step forward in understanding the functions of the brain, since I
was able to broaden the foundations of my ideas by including perceptions,
associations, skilled movements, behavioral acts, and drives. In consequence, I
was able to present a new synthesis of the integrative activity of the brain (Konorski, 1967) based on new facts and new concepts. Since,
in my experience, the full cycle of renewal of my scientific ideas requires
about two decades, this is probably the last version
of my thoughts about the functioning of the brain. Therefore, my scientific
biography seems really to have come to an end.
REFERENCES
Selected Publications by Jerzy
Konorski
[On
the variability of the motor conditioned responses. The principles
of
cortical
switching.] Przegl. Fizjol. Ruchu, 1939, 9, 1-51.
Conditioned Reflexes and
Neuron Organization.
Univ.
Press, 1948.
Integrative Activity of the
Brain.
aphasia. Acta Neurobiol. Exp., 1970, 30, 189-210.
(with S. Miller) L’influence
des excitateurs absolus et conditionnels sur les
salivomotrices. C. R. Seanc. Soc.
Biol., 1930(b), 104, 907-910.
(with S. Miller.
L’influence des excitateurs
absolus et conditionnels sur
les
reflexes conditionnels de l’analysateur
moteur. C. R. Seanc. Soc.
Biol.,
1930{a),
104,
911-914.
(with S. Miller)
The foundations of physiological theory
of acquired
movements, motor conditioned re flexes (in Polish).
Lab. I. P. Pavlova, 1936, No. 1, 119-278 (in Russian).
(with S. Miller) Further remarks on two
types of conditioned reflexes. J.
Gen. Psychol., 1937(a), 17, 405.
(with S. Miller)
On two types of conditioned reflexes. J. Gen. Psychol.,
1937(b) 16, 264-272.
(with G. Szwejkowska)
Chronic extinction and restoration of conditioned reflexes
I. Extinction against the excitatory background. Acta Biol. Exp. (
216 A
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
(with G. Szwejkowska)
Chronic extinction and restoration of conditioned reflexes
II. The dependence of the course of extinction and
restoration of conditioned reflexes on the "history" of the
conditioned stimulus (the principle of the primacy of the first training).
Acta Biol. Exp. (
(with R. Tarnecki)
Purkinje cells in the cerebellum: Their responses to postural stimuli in cats. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci.,
1970, 65, 892-897.
Other Publications Cited
Brutkowski, S., and J. Dabrowska.
Prefrontal cortex control of
Differentiation
behavior in dogs. Acta Biol. Exp. (
Brutkowski, S., J. Konorski, W. -fcawicka, and L. Stepien. The effect of Removal of
frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex on motor conditioned
reflexes. Acta Biol. Exp. (
Ellison,
G., and J. Konorski. An
investigation of the relations between Salivary and motor responses during
instrumental performance. Acta Biol. Exp. (
Fonberg, E.
The motivational role of the hypothalamus in animal behavior.
Acta. Biol. Exp. (
Fonberg, E. The role of the amygdaloid nucleus in animal behavior. Progr.
Brain Res.,1969,
22, 273-281.
Gallistel, C. R., E. Rolls, and D. Greene. Neuron function inferred from behavioral
and electrophysiological estimates of refractory period. Science, 1969,166, 1028-1030.
Gorska, T., and E. Jankowska.
The effect of deafferentation
on instrumental (type II) conditioned reflexes in dogs. Acta Biol. Exp. (
Lawicka, W., M. Mishkin, J. Kreiner, and S. Brutkowski. Delayed
response
deficit in dogs after selective ablation of proreal gyrus. Acta
Biol. Exp. (
Miller, S., and J. Konorski. Le phenomene de la generalisation motrice. C.-R. Seanc. Soc. Biol., 1928(a), 99, 1158.
Miller, S., and J. Konorski. Sur une forme particulliere des reflexes conditionnels. C. R. Seanc. Soc. Biol., 1928(b), 99, 1155-1158. (There is an English translation).
Pavlov, I. R. [Twenty years of the objective
studies of higher nervous activity behavior of animals] (in Russian), 3rd ed.,
1925. (There is an English translation).
Pavlov, I. P. [Lectures on the function of the
cerebral hemispheres] (in Russian), 1926.
(There is an English translation).
Petrazycki,
Skinner, B. F. Two types of conditioned reflex and a
pseudo-type. J. Gen.
Psychol., 1935 ,12, 66-77.
Skinner, B. F. Two types of conditioned reflex: A reply to Konorski and Miller. J. Gen. Psychol., 1937, 16, 264-272.
JERZY
KONORSKI
217
Stepien,
bilateral
ablations of sensori-motor cortex on the instrumental
(type II)
alimentary
conditioned reflexes in dogs. Acta Biol. Exp. (
1961, 21, 121-140.
Tarnecki, R. The formation of
instrumental conditioned reflexes by direct
stimulation
of sensory-motor cortex in cats. Acta Biol. Exp. (
1962, 22, 114-124.
Wyrwicka, W. Studies on motor conditioned reflexes. V. On the mechanism of the motor conditioned reaction. Acta Biol. Exp. (
Wyrwicka, W., C. Dobrzecka, and
R. Tarnecki. The effect of electrical stimulations of the hypothalamic feeding
center in satiated goats on alimentary conditioned reflexes type II. Acta Biol. Exp. (