Word: reflex
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Thomas Verny, a Canadian psychiatrist who wrote The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, believe the infant begins learning behavior patterns while it is still in the uterus. Most experts, however, assume that the genes still carry messages that primitive humans once needed for survival. The so-called Moro reflex,* for example, which makes a newborn infant reach out its arms in a desperate grasping motion whenever it feels itself falling, implies some monkey-like existence at the dawn of time. Says Lewis Lipsitt, director of the Child Study Center at Brown and a pioneer in research on babies...
Most experts now think a baby is born with a number of reflexes that are gradually replaced by the "cortical behavior" dictated from the cortex of its rapidly developing brain. Brown's Lipsitt believes that a period of "disarray" during the course of this transition may be an important element in the "crib deaths" that can mysteriously strike during the first year. The struggle to escape from accidental smothering in bedclothes, known as the "respiratory occlusion reflex," is automatic at birth but then needs to be learned. Says Lipsitt: "The peak of 'disarray' is right...
...classrooms of the Toho Gakuen school, the technicians are at work, taking the measure of one of Japan's hottest imports. They pore over its structure as carefully as they would over a new automobile design; they grasp it as firmly as they do a microchip or a reflex-camera lens, anticipating the day when their country will be as formidable in this field as it is in so many others. It is not the Three Cs-cameras, computers and cars-that fire their imagination so, but the Three Bs: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms...
...both-the dinner of stuffed sheep's head, the full-dress safari with Bond as the prey, the chase through the bazaar, the fight with the portable buzz saw, the wing-walker aerobatics that would surely end in the Afghan's death. Or was it just a reflex of exquisite boredom on the face of a polo player named Louis Jourdan...
...supplied, but the underlying difficulty remains: If, as administrators agree, the University-student relation should be one of mutual responsibility, it should not be unreasonable to ask Bok and his cronies to show respect for what students have to say as well--to listen to complaints and, without the reflex of opposition, directly and thoughtfully to respond. That would be a story...