In June 1876 his father's sister Anna Nikolaevna Ukhtomskaya, who lived in the town of Rybinsk, had just buried her mother, for whom she had cared for many years, and being now alone was looking for something to do with her life.

Since Antonina Fedorovna was very busy and had insufficient time for her family, on 27 September 1876 Alex was sent away to be raised by his aunt Anna, and in his own words, she was his "principal teacher and companion until her death in 1898."

During this period, the future professor Ivan P. Dolbnya (1853–1912), a mathematics teacher who introduced his students to a wide range of subjects of natural science, had a significant influence on him.

By age 18, he became acquainted with the writings of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Feuerbach, James, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant, and other scientists and philosophers.

As a young student of the Theological Academy, Ukhtomsky spent a month and a half in the department for chronically ill of the Yaroslavl mental hospital.

The documents from the Petrograd Soviet saved him from immediate execution, and Ukhtomsky was sent to the Yaroslavl political detention center, and then to Moscow in the special branch of the Cheka in the Lubyanka.

Since 1935 he was the founding director of the Institute of Physiology of Leningrad State University and from 1937 he was the head of the electrophysiology laboratory of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

At the turn of 1923–1924 years he presented a report at the Second All-Union Congress of Psychoneurologists and Neurophysiologists, in which he put forward the principle of dominance as one of the main factors of central innervation.

In subsequent years, he came to understand the role played by the variation in stability of the physiological substrate in the dominant focus, as expressed in the report of 1934, "Excitation, inhibition, fatigue."

According to Ukhtomsky, the dominant is a temporary governing center of excitation in the central nervous system, which creates a hidden readiness of the organism to a specific activity, while at the same time inhibiting other reflexes.

When across the country confiscation of church property started, and his parishioners tried to hide the valuables, Ukhtomsky was arrested, but nothing came of it and he was soon released, when he pledged to stop religious propaganda.

Ukhtomsky had command of seven languages, was versed in theology, philosophy, political economy, architecture, was a painter of icons, and played the violin.

In 1941 Ukhtomsky remained in besieged Leningrad, where he participated in the organization of scientific work in support of its defense, and directed research on traumatic shock that was relevant for warfare.

In a footnote to the paper ”The dominant as operating principle of nerve centers” Ukhtomsky writes: I use this term in the sense of Avenarius : "In the competition of dependent vital series, one of them must be regarded as the dominant for a given moment, and the overall behavior of the individual will then be determined in that direction.” By “dominant" Ukhtomsky and his followers understood" a more or less stable focus of increased excitability, evoked in whatever way, and stimuli newly arriving at the centers of excitation serve to amplify (reinforce) excitation in this focus, while in the rest of the central nervous system inhibition spreads widely. "

The theory of the dominant focus has outgrown the framework of physiology and became a trend in the whole Russian philosophical anthropology, and has also been applied in a psychologically oriented literary criticism.