Pavlovian baby

Today I have witnessed what I believe to be a Pavlovian reaction in one of my children. Should I be worried? For those of you unfamiliar with the ideas of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, he's the guy who invented 'the conditional reflex', which consists of the idea of conditioning as an automatic form of learning. Two things should be mentioned though:

1.
Common knowledge tells us that Pavlov signalled the occurence of food by ringing a bell and thus bringing about the conditional reflex of saliva production in a dog who believed dinnertime was nigh. However, it seems that Pavlov also used other instruments among which were metronomes, visual stimuli and electric shocks. Where was the ethical committee when that last one entered his mind, eh?
2.

Apparently he had an assistent (also Ivan) who worked with him. Ivan Tolochinov did not nearly get as much publicity as Pavlov did upon presenting the results. Does this sound familiar to any of my old junior research fellas?

But my writings are wandering from the actual subject of this blog, which is my youngest son of 9 months. He is always full of energy, playing and prancing about. However, I KNOW he gets tired around 2,5 hours after waking. Not that it really shows, because at this time he's still crawling about like a cute ant on acid (or just a regular ant for that matter, because ants always look peculiarly busy to me). So I take him to his bed, and as soon as I hit the music-button of the babyphone-type-apparatus, he starts yawning and hangs in my arms. Hello Pavlov!

To end this pseudo-scientific blog, I'll give you a quote from my all-time favorite comedian Eddie Izzard, who talked about the results of Pavlov's cat experiment. Of course the results of this study have never been published, since it did not result in significant effects (which is something for another blog):

Day 1:                 Rang bell, cat fucked off.
Day 2:                 Rang bell, cat went and answered door.
Day 3:                 Rang bell, cat said he had eaten earlier.
Day 4:                 Went to ring bell, but cat had stolen batteries.
Final day-day 5:   Went and rang bell with new batteries, but cat put his paw on bell so it only made a
                           thunk noise. Then cat rang his own bell. I ate food.