are. The reflex is typically quicker than the simple reaction.
The reflex machinery does not need a "Ready" signal, nor any
preparation, but is always ready for business. (The subject in a
simple reaction experiment would not make the particular finger
movement that he makes unless he had made ready for that movement.)
The attachment of a certain response to a certain stimulus, rather
arbitrary and temporary in the simple reaction, is inherent and
permanent in the reflex. Reflex action is involuntary and often
entirely unconscious.

Reflexes, we said, are permanent. That is because they {26} are native
or inherent in the organism. You can observe them in the new-born
child. The reflex connection between stimulus and response is
something the child brings with him into the world, as distinguished
from what he has to acquire through training and experience. He does
acquire, as he grows up, a tremendous number of habitual responds that
become automatic and almost unconscious, and these "secondary
automatic" reactions resemble reflexes pretty closely. Grasping for
your hat when you feel the wind taking it from your head is an
example. These acquired reactions never reach the extreme speed of the
quickest reflexes, but at best may have about the speed of the simple
reaction. Though often useful enough, they are not so fundamentally
necessary as the reflexes. The reflex connection of stimulus and
response is something essential, native, closely knit, and always
ready for action.

The Nerves in Reflex Action

Seeing that the response, in reflex action, is usually made by a
muscle or gland lying at some distance from the sense organ that
receives the stimulus--as, in the case of the flexion reflex, the
stimulus is applied to the skin of the hand (or foot), while the
response is made by muscles of the limb generally--we have to ask what
sort of connection exists between the stimulated organ and the
responding organ, and we turn to physiology and anatomy for our
answer. The answer is that the _nerves_ provide the connection. Strands
of nerve extend from the sense organ to the muscle.

But the surprising fact is that the nerves do not run directly from
the one to the other. There is no instance in the human body of a
direct connection between any sense organ and any muscle or gland. The
nerve path from sense organ to muscle always leads through a _nerve
center_. One {27} nerve, called the sensory nerve, runs from the sense