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The Truth About Pavlov's Dogs Is Pretty Disturbing

Bob Loblaw

Bob Loblaw

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Mar 1, 2008
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Pavlov's dogs made their name in psychology classrooms, but should probably be more famous for their physiology. A Pavlovian response is a physical, not psychological, reaction. And it's possible that that physical reaction is causing people to overdose on drugs in a very unexpected way.

The Real Story of Pavlov's Dogs

When did Pavlov's dogs start salivating? When they heard a bell, you say? Au contraire. Pavlov's dogs started salivating when they saw lab coats. Workers at a lab that studied digestion noticed that the dogs used in the experiments were drooling for seemingly no reason at all.

It was only Ivan Pavlov, a scientist working at the lab, who made the connection between the lab coats and the drool. The dogs, Pavlov reasoned, knew that they were soon going to be fed whenever they saw a lab coat. What intrigued Pavlov was the fact that a physical response could be produced solely by way of a mental association. The dogs couldn't drool on command consciously, but they could be trained to do so just the same.

That's when Pavlov went to work with meat, dogs, and bells, and did the controlled experiment that earned him fame and fortune. He won a Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for his research, but most of us hear about his famous experiment when we study psychology, not medicine. Once the Pavlovian response became a metaphor for an unthinking popular response to stimulus, it was divorced, in the public consciousness, from the physical reality. It shouldn't have been. The mind, when exposed to certain input, can prime the body into a specific state of physical readiness. This has physical, not just social or psychological, consequences.

Pavlovian Response and Drug Overdose

There are a limited amount of places where one can do drugs. Of those places, drug users select a certain few places where they prefer to do drugs, and then do drugs most often at a select number of places that are convenient. Essentially, a regular drug user will often have a regular place to take their drugs. After they've done drugs regularly in the same place, the connection is made. A bathroom, a bedroom, a certain club, will always be associated with drug use. People trying to quit drugs often talk about how they have to avoid their old haunts, because they feel a rush of anticipation. That rush is not just mental.

Scientists learned that putting a dog in a certain injection booth every day and injecting it with adrenaline produced a dog with bradycardia - a dangerously slow heartbeat - when they put the dog in the same booth but only injected it with a placebo. The dog's body was compensating for the adrenaline it anticipated. It was trying to reduce the dangerous effects of the adrenaline by slowing down the dog's heartbeat.

A drug user's body does the same. Over time people build up a tolerance for the drug, not just because the body manages to deal with the drug when it's in their system, but because the body knows to prepare for the drug before it has been administered. When a person who has built up a tolerance for a drug in a certain place goes somewhere new, the body may not know what's coming to it, and that tolerance is greatly reduced.


In one experiment, scientists studied rats who had been given regular doses of heroin. Some of the rats were taken to a new area and given a larger dose of heroin. The others were injected with the larger dose, but kept in their regular environment. The mortality rate of the rats injected in a new environment was twice that of the rats injected in the familiar environment. No similar experiment of human drug users would be conscionable, but a survey of the survivors of heroin overdoses found that seven out of ten were in a new place when they overdosed.

Even the most basic functions our bodies perform are marvels of biochemistry. When the dogs salivated, they were releasing chemicals that would help them process their food. The biochemistry involving drugs is more complicated, and more vital, than digestion. When we're not careful, we can unwittingly train ourselves into Pavlovian responses that are dangerous to ignore.
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http://io9.com/the-truth-about-pavlovs-dogs-is-pretty-disturbing-1591853321




emphasis my own 'cos wow
 
I have tried going to new places all the time when doing my shots, but I can't seem to get a better rush when going to White Castle instead of Burger King. Burger King was a my old standby.
 
Yeah..... I don't really buy into the environmental factor because copping, seeing the drug and the needle are definitely enough to get me going. It doesn't necessarily take a specific location.
 
^ and ^^ I think that it would be fairly subtle what is happening in your brain chemistry.

The 7 out of 10 statistic is pretty interesting.
 
Every time I go to a rave, I experience butterflies in my stomach, and it feels very similar to the beginning of an ecstasy trip.

The information in this article may (or may not) be helpful for HR purposes.
 
ro4eva said:
Every time I go to a rave, I experience butterflies in my stomach, and it feels very similar to the beginning of an ecstasy trip.
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I get this whenever I know I am about to inject a stimulant, it actually gets to the point where it's uncomfortable.
 
I do believe that your environment can cause a physiological craving but I do not believe that it is a strong enough factor to cause an overdose. The author says that when most addicts overdose they are in a new place but this statement is just based on the anecdotal reports of some addicts and there are no statistics to confirm this to be true. I know that the mice studies suggest this is true but addicts aren't mice in a controlled study. Humans are much more intelligent and like I said earlier we are very cognizant of the fact we are about to use because of the ritual of copping, the needle and the drug itself.
 
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I find this fascinating.
ro4eva, I do believe that this could be very useful in HR.
The message: When you are using drugs in a new location, take it slow.
 
i use to always drink johnnie walker on the weekend and did pills most of the time for a long time, after a while i stopped taking pills but everytime i drink johnnie walker i still get that rush, butterflys in my stomach and feel slight jaw tightness like from when coming up on pills
 
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There are certain tracks I still can't listen to without feeling like I'm coming up on pills. I literally avoid tracks I love because they make me want to go out and drop MDMA so fucking badly.
 
I've heard similar statistics about ODs happening in unfamiliar places before and always been baffled by it.
It sounds made up, but apparently it isn't.
The idea that there is some sort of instinctual/evolutionary response occurring is really fascinating.

Thanks for posting this!
 
slimvictor said:
I find this fascinating.
ro4eva, I do believe that this could be very useful in HR.
The message: When you are using drugs in a new location, take it slow.
Click to expand...

Oh I agree with you - I've experienced this sort of thing so many times I've lost count (not proud of it).

Even now after all these years, if I go to a club where I used to roll a lot, it still gets me.

The reason I had added "or may not" in brackets was because it seems that not everyone is affected by their environment based on their comments. Or perhaps they are but it's so mild that.... yeah...
 
^ it's the "OD in unfamiliar surroundings" bit - rather than the "psychosomatic perception of drugs when reminded of them by an environmental trigger (place, event, song)" that could potentially have postive HR implications IMO.

I was sent to a "drug education session" as part of a cannabis infringement (cops found a tiny amount of cannabis in my possession in unfortunate circumstances) - as part of the quasi-decriminalisation of cannabis in Western Australia.
It was at this session (at a HR focussed rehab/drug services clinic) that I was first told about this phenomena.

I was a bit sceptical at the time, thinking it was a strange bit of prohibition mythology - but later read more about it.
Basically it was part of this clinic's general drug spiel: "if you are going to use heroin/strong opiates - do not do so alone or in unfamiliar surroundings.
Also, it was about 5 years ago - so it is obviously something that the medical and drug support communities have been aware of - or attempting to understand - for a few years at least.

Regardless of the scientific basis for this kind of HR advice - if it is demonstrably true, why not warn people of the danger of getting really loaded in unfamiliar settings (where possible)?
It's certainly very interesting.

I think there is certainly plenty of reason to be sceptical about this, but in the case of heroin overdose - as far as I am aware, a complete scientific understanding of all of the factors at play is not fully known - as it stands, I believe the majority of fatal overdoses involving opiates involve multiple CNS depressant drugs.

(Also - whether it was a facetious remark or not - I don't think the john in two different fast food joints counts as "an unfamiliar environment", as suggested above! haha; a public shithouse is a public shithouse, right?)
 
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Has no one heard the Vietnam veteran addict example? A huge amount got addicted in Nam but when they came back lots of them overdosed because of the new surroundings. Interestingly, many were able to quit with minimal withdrawal symptoms since they had left the horrors of war that led to their addiction in the first place.
 
Sure, that is another interesting case.
I do think it is a matter of interpretation to some extent though.

Cheap, plentiful heroin - in an environment where it is socially acceptable (as everyone expects to die and has stopped caring) was also exclusive to the Vietnamese warzone.
It is hard to remove standard addicts away from their supply, their using environment, their social group - all at once like that, and (more or less) permanently.
It is certainly interesting, granted - but I don't know what sort of application the example has.

Adjusting to post-war civilian life is a big enough deal for most soldiers - the trauma and literal acclimatisation (from tropical jungle, in a tense, traumatic, foreign existence - back to "western" life) is going to make the experience of withdrawal a different thing to people who use (and quit) opiates at home.
I have also heard of people using therapeutic narcotics (daily, for long time periods) having minimal opiate withdrawal symptoms.
It seems quite clear that psychological response is a large factor in opiate WD - but it is hard to recreate such scenarios for 'average' opiate dependent people (short of some kind of "witness protection program" sort of deal...!)
It seems that the more emotional self medicating the user is engaging in, the tougher it is for them to get clean (as a very, very broad statement).
Very interesting nonetheless.
 
spacejunk said:
I think there is certainly plenty of reason to be sceptical about this, but in the case of heroin overdose - my understanding is that a complete understanding of all of the factors at play is not fully understood by science - as it stands, I believe the majority of fatal overdoses involving opiates involve multiple CNS depressant drugs.
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My God, I just experienced an enormous déja vu.

Anyways, you are correct, I think, in that the vast majority of heroin (or other opioid) overdoses are a result of polydrug use.

Also, if the culprit is only heroin, a lot of the time it turns out that the "heroin" is actually something much more potent like fentanyl being sold as heroin.
 
Fuck...talk about bad syntax, bad syntax talk while you talk about bad syntax. Badly. Fuck!

Sobriety is killing my mind. Seriously!

Edit - fixed it out of concern for my crumbling intellect hahaha
 
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Dur! It is an example of situational tolerance going both ways. It is the extreme case of it that illustrates the concept. You do not need to replicate such an extreme scenario for it to be relevant, god damn... It can be applied less intensely to more typical circumstances easily. I gave the quintessential, historic example if the concept, you need to come to terms with that, spacejunk.

The ones who quit easily when returning home may very well have been the ones relived that the stress war was over.
 
Relax man, not everyone that doesn't agree with everything you say is having a go at you.
If you weren't so wound up and aggressive you might be able to see that, and have a decent discussion.

The reason I mentioned "situational replication" to begin with is that the possible implications for treatment and harm reduction advice that was mentioned - and how this idea - assuming there is more than a grain of truth to it - could be used to help people.

Why I am even bothering to explain this to someone who starts their post with "dur" is the real question, but your attitude only serves to make you look the fool, so - y'know, what the hell.
 
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