Cerebration

Cerebration, Unconscious. This term has been applied to cases of the following kind: - A person, after making unavailing attempts to remember something, puts the question aside, and then suddenly, when he is occupied with an entirely different class of thoughts, the fact he has been striving to recollect flashes across his mind. To call such a phenomenon unconscious cerebration implies a belief in a theory, viz. that the elaboration of reasoning processes in the brain can go on unconsciously. This may be the case, but most instances of so-called unconscious cerebration admit of other and simpler explanations.