Word: stimuli
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...salivary glands and on the nerves of the heart. His current work is on the functioning of the brain. Behaviorists have taken up his theories and made them fairly common knowledge. His picture of mental activity is mechanistic. The brain acts according to habits. Certain repeated stimuli condition it (and the physical and physiological activities which it 'controls) so that the reappearance of a stimulus causes the old response. Sight of a milk bottle makes the baby suck his lips. Sleep, he considers, is the result of inhibitions keeping stimuli from overworking the brain or causing it to do useless...
...Archipenko, possessor of an arresting linear imagination; there are Allan Clark's glamorous oriental shapes; Harriet Whitney Frishmuth's tender and charming studies of adolescence; Jacob Epstein's mottled, vigorous countenances; Paul Manship's images of swift, hound-escorted Diana and Actacon. Many are the stimuli for the senses, but nowhere is the mind so provoked and fascinated as before the portrait sculpture of Jo Davidson. Master of men and millions, the face of John Davison Rockefeller is anxious, unbelievably seamed above his sparse and fragile body. Mistress of precious intellection and writer of what seems...
...what is worse, the ready spice of polite dinner conversations will now be salted down with the trivialities of unassisted literary search. As for the adolescents of the city, they will again be reduced to a meticulous investigation of the dictionary and other of the standard and immemorial stimuli. But the die is cast, and Joyce is about to cross the Charles...
...little time in place of the various intellectual stimuli offered in and around the Yard he must substitute references to the lily fields of Bermuda and the warmth of the surf at Waikiki, to the blooming of the tulips in the Bois de Boulogne and the peach trees in Georgia, to the sunrises on Mt. Washington and the sunsets in the Golden Gate, and perhaps as well for if space can be conquered, why should time be a barrier? to the midnight sun at the North Cape. These by no means exhaust his opportunities; he has a quantity of other...
Whether snakes respond instinctively to the charmer's whines and whistles is still an unsettled problem in animal psychology. Snakes have little brain and much spine. They are quick to respond to stimuli, and perhaps react directly to seductive vibrations. More probably their swaying-it is no dance-is a conditioned reflex. Charmers feed their snakes well, in India with milk, flour balls and meat (frogs). And it is doubtless with mounting hope of meals that snakes raise themselves to the fakir's minor music. Charmers who have tried their art in U. S. zoos and serpentaria have...