Gregory H. Razran (4 June 1901, in Slutsk – 31 August 1973, in

St Petersburg, Florida St. Petersburg is a city in Pinellas County, Florida, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 258,308, making it the fifth-most populous city in Florida and the second-largest city in the Tampa Bay Area, after Tampa. It is the ...

) was a

Russian American Russian Americans ( rus, русские американцы, r=russkiye amerikantsy, p= ˈruskʲɪje ɐmʲɪrʲɪˈkant͡sɨ) are Americans of full or partial Russian ancestry. The term can apply to recent Russian immigrants to the United State ...

expert on Russian psychological research. He left Russia in 1920 and studied at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

gaining a doctorate in 1933. He moved to

Queens College, City University of New York Queens College (QC) is a public college in the Queens Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City. It is part of the City University of New York system. Its 80-acre campus is primarily located in Flushing, Queens. It has a student body ...

in 1940 where he became a professor and headed the Psychology department there from 1945 to 1966. He received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 1948. Razran regarded the work of

Ivan Pavlov Ivan Petrovich Pavlov ( rus, Ива́н Петро́вич Па́влов, , p=ɪˈvan pʲɪˈtrovʲɪtɕ ˈpavləf, a=Ru-Ivan_Petrovich_Pavlov.ogg; 27 February 1936), was a Russian and Soviet experimental neurologist, psychologist and physiol ...

as a "

Trojan horse The Trojan Horse was a wooden horse said to have been used by the Greeks during the Trojan War to enter the city of Troy and win the war. The Trojan Horse is not mentioned in Homer's ''Iliad'', with the poem ending before the war is concluded, ...

" in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

, incompatible with Marxism-Leninism. In 1950, he published a short piece about the Soviet

behaviourist Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual ...

, Emmanuil Enchmen, a loyal Stalinist whose scientific views had been proscribed since 1923. In 1964 Razran was prominently featured in an article on

Dermo-optical perception Dermo-optical perception (DOP) – also known as dermal vision, dermo-optics, eyeless sight, eyeless vision, skin vision, skin reading, finger vision, paroptic vision, para-optic perception, cutaneous perception, digital sight, and bio-introscopy � ...

, a discredited phenomenon which has not been demonstrated scientifically. This reviewed the research of Abram S. Novomeysky into the abilities of Rosa Kuleshova. Razran declared that "there is no longer any doubt in his mind that this work was valid." In fact Razran was quite excited about the research: "In all my years, I can't remember when anything has had me more excited than this prospect of opening up new doors of perception." Complaining that he was too excited to sleep at night, he opined that this was a "major scientific breakthrough" which would lead to an "explosive outburst of research" whose results were "bound to be revolutionary". Razran was keen to return to

, where he was a professor and planned to carry out further research in this area himself. He moved to

where he was professor at Eckerd College. He drowned while swimming at the age of 72.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Razran, Gregory 1901 births 1973 deaths Emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States 20th-century American psychologists Deaths by drowning in the United States