35 Facts About Ivane Beritashvili

Ivane Beritashvili, was one of the great Georgian physiologists, one of the founders of the modern biobehavioral science.

Ivane Beritashvili was a founder and director of a school of physiology in Georgia; academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, founding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR and of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR.

For more than a half-century of his activity, Beritashvili was considered a leader among neurophysiologists of Central and Eastern European countries and the former Soviet Union.

Ivane Beritashvili began his experimental research early, as a third year student under the supervision of the eminent Russian physiologist Prof.

At the recommendation of Wedensky, Ivane Beritashvili left for Kazan in autumn 1911 to work with Prof.

At the start of the World War I Ivane Beritashvili had to cease his research and return to St Petersburg.

In 1915 Ivane Beritashvili had to leave St Petersburg and move to Odessa as a Senior Assistant to Prof.

One year later, after Ivane Beritashvili had been appointed a private docent, he began giving lectures in the course on the physiology of the nerve-muscle system.

In 1919 he set up this Department and from that time onward Ivane Beritashvili succeeded in progressively developing intensive physiological teaching and research in Georgia.

Later, in 1937, Ivane Beritashvili published a comprehensive handbook in Moscow in Russian entitled General Physiology of Nerve and Muscle Systems.

Ivane Beritashvili was initially Head of the Biological Division of the Caucasian Branch of Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and after the foundation of the Georgian Academy of Sciences he was Head of its Department of Biomedical Sciences.

In 1938 Ivane Beritashvili was awarded the Pavlov Prize for important contributions to the study of the peripheral and central nervous systems, and higher brain functions.

In 1939 Ivane Beritashvili established the Georgian Society for Physiology, Biochemistry and Pharmacology.

Ivane Beritashvili wrote his first book in 1916, at the age of 32, and his last, revised and expanded, was published in 1974, the year of his death when he was almost 90 years old.

Ivane Beritashvili died of acute pneumonia on 29 December 1974 in Tbilisi, two weeks before his 90-year jubilee.

Ivane Beritashvili was buried in the square of Tbilisi State University, alongside the founder of the university, Ivane Javakhishvili.

In Wedensky's laboratory, and at the same time as Charles S Sherrington, Beritashvili used the string galvanometer to study the central coordination of spinal reflexes in the registration of action currents of antagonist muscles.

Ivane Beritashvili showed that during the rotation of the neck around the body in which the receptors of the neck muscles were stimulated, and during changes of head position, in which labyrinthine receptors were stimulated, the only effect was an increase of excitability of certain tonic centers.

Ivane Beritashvili was greatly interested in the problems of general inhibition.

Ivane Beritashvili concluded that general inhibition was an indispensable component of the central nervous system response to any stimulation, even subthreshold stimulation that evoked an outward reaction.

Ivane Beritashvili was one of the first physiologists to appreciate fully the role of dendrites and in 1941 formulated the notion that dendrites generate local, non-conductive currents in response to impulses.

Ivane Beritashvili began to investigate animal behavior while studying conditioned reflexes in Tbilisi in the 1920s.

Ivane Beritashvili introduced a new experimental approach allowing the free movement of animals.

Ivane Beritashvili was highly critical of this approach, as well as of the behaviorism, prevalent in North America at that time.

Ivane Beritashvili concluded that in higher vertebrates an image of the food and its location arose during the animal's perception of the food.

Ivane Beritashvili assumed this behavior to be a complex of voluntary movements peculiar to higher vertebrates and mammals as well as to little children.

Ivane Beritashvili supposed that whenever a feeding behavior is learned that is directed towards a particular food box, it originally conforms to the reproduced food image.

In 1947, Ivane Beritashvili first summarized his theory in the book Basic Forms of Neural and Psychoneural Activity, and then extended it in his next monograph Neural Mechanisms of Higher Vertebrate Behavior.

Between 1955 and 1959, after his rehabilitation, Ivane Beritashvili focused his research on problems of spatial orientation in higher vertebrates, infants, and man.

Ivane Beritashvili established that various sensory receptors are involved in producing the image of spatial orientation, but that only the stimulation of visual, auditory and labyrinthine receptors can induce images of the spatial arrangement of external objects in the environment and their spatial relations to the animal's location.

Ivane Beritashvili concluded that spatial orientation in higher vertebrates is reflected in their ability to project an object into space and localize its position in relation to itself or to other objects, and this after a single perception of the respective object by the animal.

Ivane Beritashvili was acutely aware that image-driven behavior referred not only to an object or event, but a location.

Ivane Beritashvili distinguished three types of vertebrate memory: image-driven memory, emotional memory, and conditioned-reflex memory.

Together with his collaborators, Ivane Beritashvili carried out fundamental research on the phylogeny of the image-driven memory and found that particularly in fish, amphibians and reptiles, only short-term memory images are formed, but in birds long-term memory images exist.

Ivane Beritashvili considered the substrate of image-driven memory to be located in the neural circuits between the proreal fissure, the visual cortex, the inferior temporal cortex, and the hippocampus.