Hi, we've got three of your favorite stories from the past years to help you get

smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about why the one thing you probably know about Pavlov and his dogs

is wrong, the tourist trap to end all

tourist traps, and why researchers think cats love boxes.

Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning Curiosity Daily.

Remember Pavlov's dogs from psychology class?

Ivan Pavlov was the Russian physiologist best known for his work with the conditioned reflex.

As in, he trained his dogs to salivate when they heard the sound of a bell because they knew food was coming.

Well, today in mythbusting, we're going to take a second look at Pavlov's dogs because it turns out you may have been lied to.

I use the term Pavlovian response all the time.

Me too, yeah. The generic term is conditioned response which is not as cool at all.

No, not nearly.

No. After this story, are we going to have to rethink our use of the term?

It depends.

According to the biography Ivan Pavlov, a Russian life in science, Pavlov never actually used a bell with his dogs.

According to his biographer, Professor Daniel P. Toads, it would have been a bad experimental practice to do that.

He wrote, quote, indeed, the iconic bell would have proven totally useless to his real goal, which required precise

control over the quality and duration of stimuli. He most frequently employed a metronome,

a harmonium, a buzzer, and electric shock, unquote." The bell idea probably came from a

mistranslation of the Russian word for buzzer, but wait there's more. You know

how you learned about Pavlov when you were learning about psychology? Well really you should have learned about it as a about he was able to actually trigger a physical reflex in the form of salivation.

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