Word: reflex
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...essentially the same not only political brainwashing and extorted confessions but religious conversions as well. The all-purpose key, according to Sargant, is to be found in the theories of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936), the Russian physiologist and would-be psychologist who proved that his famed "conditioned-reflex" dogs knew for whom the bell tolled...
Pavlov's conditioned-reflex theory (a dog regularly fed at the ringing of a bell will eventually salivate at the mere sound, even though no food is offered) was only the beginning. In later work, which got little attention in the West, Pavlov sought to prove that dogs are of four temperamental types, "strong excitatory," "lively," "calm imperturbable, or phlegmatic," and "weak inhibitory."* Further, he developed an elaborate theory of both positive and negative conditioned responses, which appear in varying patterns when a dog is subjected to unendurable stress ("trans-marginally stimulated"). A dog usually breaks down...
...himself spelled it out in a pamphlet entitled Socialism and the Intellectuals. Fumblingly written but painfully sincere, it may be the first authentic manifesto of an apolitical literary age. Amis confesses that he finds politics a bore, and that he votes the Labor ticket as a kind of conditioned reflex-two admissions which infuriated British Laborites and old-line liberals. Analyzing his own apathy, Amis makes the pertinent reflection that intellectuals are political romantics who can be stirred by extreme situations: "Romanticism in a political context I would define as an irrational capacity to become inflamed by interests and causes...
...taste. He labored over makeup and stage business-he once spent hours hurling himself to the floor of the Met's stage to learn how Boris Godunov should die. At a few hours' notice he could move through any one of half a hundred roles with the reflex authority of a fine ballplayer...
...Japan's $99.50 Minolta Autocord, introduced last year as the cheapest, quality twin-lens reflex camera anyone could expect, is being superseded by an even less expensive model: a new automatic Yashica-Mat at only $75.50, which will give budget-conscious amateurs near-professional tools...