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Cerebration   Listen
noun
Cerebration  n.  Action of the brain, whether conscious or unconscious.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cerebration" Quotes from Famous Books



... N. thought; exercitation of the intellect^, exercise of the intellect; intellection; reflection, cogitation, consideration, meditation, study, lucubration, speculation, deliberation, pondering; head work, brain work; cerebration; deep reflection; close study, application &c (attention) 457. abstract thought, abstraction contemplation, musing; brown study &c (inattention) 458; reverie, Platonism; depth of thought, workings of the mind, thoughts, inmost thoughts; self-counsel ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... Belongs to the moss-back half of femininity. Has serious objection to use of her head, except for decorative purposes. Was not averse to press notices and looked with envy on the achievements of the suffragettes in this direction. Being denied high office in their ranks because of lack of adequate cerebration, she set up a rival organization where brains were not requisite. Entertains the utterly absurd idea that all women, except herself, belong at home with their husbands and children. Where they belong in the absence of these, deponent sayeth not. Ambition: Continued parasitic ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous

... and family and household seen somehow from a new angle, but by the recollection of the past. Though he often went through dark moods, they were not moods of financial pessimism; they seemed to be causeless, inexplicable, and indescribable—abysses in which cerebration ceased. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... suddenly grow conscious. Sir William Hamilton and Professor Laycock of Edinburgh were among the first to call attention to this class of effects; but Dr. Carpenter first, unless I am mistaken, introduced the term "unconscious cerebration," which has since then been a popular phrase of explanation. The facts are now known to us far more extensively than he could know them, and the adjective "unconscious," being for many of them almost certainly a misnomer, is better ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... element of progress? Arthritis, for example, infects the blood and introduces into it scoriae, a kind of refuse, of an imperfect organic combustion; but may not this very impurity happen to make the blood more stimulative? May not this impure blood promote a more active cerebration precisely because it is impure? Water that is chemically pure is undrinkable. And may not also blood that is physiologically pure be unfit for the brain of the vertical mammal that has to ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... provide you with those comforts to which you are accustomed. So much for my pecuniary position. As to my constitution, it has always been sound. I have never suffered from any illness in my life, save fleeting attacks of cephalalgia, the result of too prolonged a stimulation of the centres of cerebration. My father and mother had no sign of any morbid diathesis, but I will not conceal from you that my ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle

... are thoughtful and impressible. The water seems to do half the thinking while one is looking at it; its movements are felt in the brain very much like thought. When I was in full training as a flaneur, I could stand on the Pont Neuf with the other experts in the great science of passive cerebration and look at the river for half an hour with so little mental articulation that when I moved on it seemed as if my thinking-marrow had been asleep and was just waking up refreshed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... been happening? About twenty minutes would be required to perform this elaborate series of actions, and they had been performed exactly as if I had been guiding them, while in reality I knew nothing about them. Shall we call my conduct unconscious cerebration? Yes, if we like large words which cover ignorance. I do not see how we can certainly say what was going on. Perhaps during all this time I had neither consciousness nor self-consciousness. I may have been a mere automaton, under the control of a series of reflex actions. The feeling ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... of geography and arithmetic, of Latin, Greek and chemistry, in the brain-work of the school room, force that should have been spent in the manufacture of blood, muscle, and nerve, that is, in growth. The results are monstrous brains and puny bodies; abnormally active cerebration, and abnormally weak digestion; flowing thought and constipated bowels; lofty aspirations ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke

... shelves, some of which may indeed be of more practical value than dates. In college, at least, history should aim to explain social tendencies and processes in a rational way rather than to develop the memory. The latter method tends to make the student passive and narrow, the former requires cerebration and develops breadth and depth of vision. Understanding history, rather than memorizing it, has cultural value. To be sure, understanding presupposes information; but where there is a desire to understand, the process of seeking and acquiring the information ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... temporary inaction. In his own art, the art of design, whether this assumed the form of sculpture or of painting or of architecture, he did nothing except at the highest pressure. All his accomplished work shows signs of the intensest cerebration. But he tried at times to slumber, sunk in a wise passiveness. Then he communed with the poets, the prophets, and the prose-writers of his country. We can well imagine, therefore, that, tired with the labours of the chisel or the brush, he gladly gave ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... must go out and face them: stand once more outside, free of walls, and stare about at the whole chain of the earth-lords. Perhaps the spring, which had broken up the ice-bound streams, had melted other things besides. Unwittingly—by unconscious cerebration—by the long inevitable storing of disdained impressions—she had arrived at vision. That which had been, for her, alternate gibberish and silence, had become an intelligible tongue. The blank features had stirred and shifted into a countenance; ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... theory of the day is that this mental action is one essentially hidden from the mind itself. The name "unconscious cerebration" has been proposed for it by Dr. Carpenter, and he has amply and ably illustrated its peculiarities. But his theory has encountered just criticism, and I am persuaded does not meet the requirements of the case. Whether at such moments the mind actually receives some impulse from without, as is the ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... amount of thinking and feeling about sex that is going on in Cambridge this morning. The hundreds out of these thousands full of it. A vast tank of cerebration. And we put none of it together; we work nothing out from that but poor little couplings and casual stories, patchings up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders, disease, trouble, escapes; and the next generation will start, and the next generation after that will start with nothing ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... that every age lives by its special catchwords. Whether from rebellion against the irking monotony of its inherited creeds or from compulsions generated by its own complexities, each age develops its code of convenient illusions which minimize cerebration in dilemmas of conduct by postulating an unequivocal cleavage between the current right and the current wrong. It works until men tire of it or challenge the cleavage, or until conditions render the code obsolete. ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

... immersion in a single business. And all the more if that be sedentary, uneventful, and ingloriously safe. More than one half of him will then remain unexercised and undeveloped; the rest will be distended and deformed by over-nutrition, over-cerebration, and the heat of rooms. And I have often marvelled at the impudence of gentlemen who describe and pass judgment on the life of man, in almost perfect ignorance of all its necessary elements and natural careers. Those who dwell in clubs and studios may paint ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Bulchester. The rest of the day she was more or less abstracted, and went to bed with her mind full of indistinct images brooded over by that vague trouble, the very stuff of which dreams are made. And more than this, out of which the brain in the unconscious cerebration of sleep, sometimes, drawing all the tangled threads into order, weaves from them a web on which ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various

... necessarily mental in the final analysis, we assume that there is a phase of consciousness below that of cognition of "self," which may be termed "the unconscious consciousness," which again is synonymous with the phrase "automatic cerebration." ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... opened my eyes; it made me jump out of my bed with the movement of a man who remembers that he has left the house door ajar or a candle burning under a shelf. Was I still in time to save my goods? That question was in my heart; for what had now come to pass was that in the unconscious cerebration of sleep I had swung back to a passionate appreciation of Miss Bordereau's papers. They were now more precious than ever, and a kind of ferocity had come into my desire to possess them. The condition ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James

... numerous experiments and investigations into the normal and abnormal working of the human mind, psychologists have discovered that a great deal of our ordinary mental action goes on without our being aware of it. This unconscious cerebration, as it is called, can hardly be seriously disputed, for every new addition to our psychological knowledge goes to confirm it. Hence we are hearing a great deal about the subconscious mind, or subliminal consciousness ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... his mind, and in the secousse of a new and intense experience they just struck light." She positively struck light herself—she was literally, facially luminous. I stammered something about unconscious cerebration, and she continued: "He'll come right home—this will ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James

... his immersion in a single business. And all the more if that be sedentary, uneventful, and ingloriously safe. More than half of him will then remain unexercised and undeveloped; the rest will be distended and deformed by over-nutrition, over-cerebration and the heat of rooms. And I have often marvelled at the impudence of gentlemen who describe and pass judgment on the life of man, in almost perfect ignorance of all its necessary elements and natural careers. Those who dwell in clubs and studios ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... and I will give you rest." The truth dawned upon me gradually, but with irresistible force. How often have we been perplexed and in doubt on some great question of truth or duty until finally the solution came to us as if by magic. Through what the psychologists call subconscious cerebration our mind has been working at the great problem even when our conscious attention was given to other matters. I have had a number of such experiences before and since, and, had I not examined them critically, ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz

... is producing enormous quantities of cerebration, but is it anything more than chaotic and futile cerebration? We are told all sorts of things in answer to that, things without a scrap of evidence or probability to support them. It is, we are assured, turning people to religion, making them moral and thoughtful. It is also, we are assured ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

... celerity inconceivable, sum up the argument on either side of the proposition you announce, and accept or reject it by a process of unconscious mental cerebration. ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... wanting to come was all unconscious cerebration," said his wife disdainfully. "Well, now you ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells

... theory to prove that the Australian aboriginal is indeed and in fact the missing link, and thereby excel in ethnological venture those who merely recognise in him the relic from a prehistoric age of man. Could it not be argued that the picture reveals an act of unconscious cerebration—an instinctive ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... future inquiry, the definite way in which Myers has thrown it down is a new and specific challenge to inquiry. For half a century now, psychologists have fully admitted the existence of a subliminal mental region, under the name either of unconscious cerebration or of the involuntary life; but they have never definitely taken up the question of the extent of this region, never sought explicitly to map it out. Myers definitely attacks this problem, which, after him, it ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... roots, hidden roots, which bury themselves deep in the soil of the heart. They extend far below clear cerebration, twisting and twining themselves in "the fringe of consciousness." It takes the fire of the Holy Ghost to follow them deep into the ground and destroy them. It used to be a pastime of the boys in eastern Ohio to pile great heaps of brush upon huge stumps in newly-cleared land. All ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees

... Eitel, my second officer, and a Zenian. He was thin and very dark, like all Zenians, and had the high, effeminate voice of that people. But he was cool and fearless and had the uncanny cerebration of his kind; I trusted him as completely as I trusted Barry, my first officer, who, like myself, was a native of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... time-table in the muddle-headed way peculiar to railway porters, and stroking his chin with his hand to assist cerebration, announced, after a severe internal struggle, that the 3.45 down, slow, was ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... itself could drop down into her state of ecstatic coma with hardly a plop. She had neither capacity for exactitude nor tireless fidelity to tone. It made her neck ache. She had never graduated from musical sensation to cerebration; a theme washed her over with all the voluptuous abandon of a Henner sea siren letting the water tickling up the beach ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... long person like a knitting-needle. The stout man called the boy to him, passed his hand carefully over the bumps of his head, and then, turning to the father, said, "From what I gather of this child's talents from my examination of his cranial cerebration, my brother's system of education is exactly the one calculated to develop them," The men were two brothers named Arnold, who proposed to open a little school in Hillsborough and were tramping the country ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon

... antenatal incarnation of his own soul? The soul of some ancestor or ancestress—of his mother, perhaps? or, perhaps, some occult portion of himself—of his own brain in unconscious cerebration ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... hope. But if upon your undeserving head Science and letters had their glory shed; If in the cavern of your skull the light Of knowledge shone where now eternal night Breeds the blind, poddy, vapor-fatted naughts Of cerebration that you think are thoughts— Black bats in cold and dismal corners hung That squeak and gibber when you move your tongue— You would not write, in Avarice's defense, A senseless eulogy on lack of sense, Nor ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce



Words linked to "Cerebration" :   cerebrate, construction, provision, higher cognitive process, mysticism, mental synthesis, abstract thought, planning, excogitation, intellection, problem solving, train of thought, divergent thinking, thought, convergent thinking, line of thought, explanation, mentation, thought process



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