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Biographical Information
on Dr. Roger Ray

    Intellectual and Research Influences:

        At UT I was greatly influenced by William S. Verplank. His History and Systems course literally set the tone of the rest of my career. It was there that I was first introduced to the work of J. R. Kantor, as well as most of the European ethologists. But my continuing interests in somatic-autonomic coupling dynamics first sparked by the interoceptive conditioning literature led me to negotiate a dissertation on classical (Pavlovian) conditioning using stomach distention as a CS and electrical shock to the tail as an UCS. Jasper Brener's lab had just published some of the earliest American work on "biofeedback" on both human and animal subjects in direct competition with Neal Miller's group.

      Biofeedback has it origins in the same Razran (1961) paper I had reported on at Wisconsin, so Dr. Brener agreed to let me explore this classical conditioning dimension while the remainder of the lab focused on instrumental, or operant, conditioning of autonomic responses. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as interpretations ultimately decided), I attempted to use a then-standard "curarization" procedure for eliminating "somatic" activity as a "noise" factor in attempts to directly condition autonomic control, just as the biofeedback researchers were also doing. My fortune was created by the fact that I could totally obliterate all cardiovascular responsivity to electrical shock to the tail simply by using the curare protocol that was reportedly in use by those teaching animals very fine-detailed discriminative cardiovascular responding.

      My dissertation (Ray, 1969) caused a bit of a stir in the biofeedback community and was actually "held back" from publication for a while until replications could be established in Dr. Brener's and other's labs (especially Dr. Paul Obrist's lab). Published versions came in Ray (1972) and Ray and Brener (1973). It eventually led to what was euphemistically called "the Curare Caper" and became an interesting case study in the social dynamics of psychological research (and what some were privately viewing as a chase for a Nobel Prize).

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