GRGR(7) - Pavlovian Heresy

[David Morris]

----------
(90.10) Pavlov believed that obsession and paranoid delusions were the
result of certain [...] cells [...] being excited to a level where,
through reciprocal induction, all the area around becomes inhibited.
One bright burning point, surrounded by darkness.
----------
(143.38) So the Pavlovian dithers about his office, feeling restless and
old.  He should sleep but he can't.  It has to be more than simple
conditioning of a child, once upon a time.  How could he've been a
doctor this long an not developed reflexes for certain conditions?  He
knows better: he knows it is more. [...]

There is to this enterprise, Pointsman knows, a danger of seduction.
Because of the symmetry.... He's been led before, you know, down the
garden path by symmetry: in certain test results... in assuming that a
mechanism must imply its mirror image - "irradiation," for example, and
"reciprocal induction"... and who'd ever said either had to exist?
----------

"Who'd ever said?"  Pavlov, of course.  Jumping ship, Pointy?

One thing Pointy's very afraid of is his own advancing age, without
major accomplishment, no Prize, and the eventual "Curse of the Mummy":

(144.30) "He must seize now, or be doomed to the same stone hallways,
whose termination he knows."