Word: reflexive
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...down and admitted that colds are caused by a draft. Their language, however, was somewhat different from grandma's. Said Dr. Irwin Gabriel Spiesman of Maywood, Ill., making a clean breast of it to 99 other experts in Atlantic City: "Rapid cooling of most cutaneous surfaces produces a reflex vasoconstriction [tightening of blood vessels] and ischemia [lack of blood] leading to lowered mucous membrane temperature of the upper respiratory tract...
Thus, from the brain down to the nervous finger tips of Britain's fighting organism, run the impulses of considered daily action. Occasionally there come surprises and crises, and when they do come the point of reflex is the busy headquarters of Sir Percy Lockhart Harnam Noble...
...reflex act must begin with a stimulus outside the body, but man's mind can will motor activity spontaneously, can even pursue pure contemplation (as in pondering a problem). "Between energy [i.e., matter] and mind," says Sherrington, "science has found no 'how' of give and take. . . . Physiology has not enough to offer about the brain in relation to the mind to lend the psychiatrist much help...
...happenings met with in such a compound organism as ourselves," says Sherrington, "... a certain residue seemingly not thus resoluble" into chemico-physical energy-systems. This nonmaterial residue is the mind. Sherrington's half-century of studying the human brain has proved that mental behavior is not entirely reflex and thus rooted ultimately in matter (as Pavlov's Soviet disciples believe...
Congressional reaction to the bill was more like a reflex. Members who saw that the British Fleet could use New York and Norfolk as repair harbors at U. S. expense jumped like cats from a hot stove. There was immediate general agreement that the bill would pass-with perhaps slight modification-by overwhelming majorities, in from three to six weeks. The only way to defeat a bill the President really wants has been a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. Now the Southern Democrats are interventionist almost to a man and Republicans are hopelessly split. Isolationist Senators Wheeler, Taft...