[brianpan]

I learned about the reflex arc in the early 1980's via Charlie Brown's "Questions and Answers" series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Brown%27s_Super_Book_o...

It wasn't named, but it was presented as "if you accidentally touched a hot stove, your reflexes would move your hand before you felt the pain because the round trip to your spine is a shorter path." Which thinking about it now, doesn't quite make sense as an explanation because one is a round trip and the other is not, but oh well. There was an accompanying picture showing a round trip to the base of the skull/top of the spine (not the middle of the spine like the picture in wikipedia).

I did not learn about this in school, but it was apparently accepted enough to put into a children's "encyclopedia".