Dictionary

superliminal en · ADJ

Pronunciation

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Etymology

From super- + liminal.

Meanings

1. (of mental activity) Of, pertaining to, or involving conscious awareness; above the threshold of the subconscious.
   • And it does not matter how you subdivide the mind into what you call the subliminal, the superliminal, the superconscious, the subconscious or whatever. 1948, Stewart Edward White et al., The Job of Living, page 80:
   • Conscious or subconscious, subliminal or superliminal, they are still “mental processes.” 2011, R. S. Perinbanayagam, Discursive Acts: Language, Signs, and Selves, →ISBN, page 76:
   • If the illumination is steadily increased from sub-liminal to super-liminal values, the deeply saturated colour will come out from the blackness. 1924, James P. C. Southall (translator), Hermann von Helmholtz (author), Helmholtz's Treatise on Physiological Optics Volume 1 (1962 Dover edition, a translation of Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik, 1867), p. 367 (Google snippet view)
   • In him you simply have nature's top-notch imitator. He never questions, he never asks why. . . . His brain, the conscious, active, superliminal, is not able to grasp a situation and reason it out. 1930 Nov, Hubbard Nye, “Playing Nursemaid to a Chimpanzee”, in Boys' Life, retrieved 20 Nov 2013, page 67:
2. (of mental activity, rare) Of, pertaining to, or involving a supposed kind of awareness which is above and beyond the experiential range of normal consciousness.
   • Commonly the hero, in an altered state of consciousness or under an intoxication of the senses, must pierce the veil of secrecy and penetrate to the superliminal, there to experience that which is not easily communicated, but which, even religions agree, quells all false divisions and partakes of unity. 2005, Eles T. Mann, The Image In The Mirror, →ISBN, page 216:
   • The psychologist Gustav T. Fechner once introduced the idea of stimuli that are so weak that they are subliminal; they remain below the threshold of our perception and consciousness. Anders suggests that we must consider the opposite also, namely, stimuli that are absolutely too strong to be registered by our perception and imagination, stimuli that are superliminal. These can influence our behavior, passively and actively. 2000, Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Contributions of Günther Anders, →ISBN, pages 77–78:
   • The better we realise these differences, the more averse shall we be to predicting to what depth into our cellular being such perception may be pushed by those artifices of hypnotic trance, automatic writing, &c., which we are only just learning to employ. Who, even now, can maintain that there is any true psychological line of distinction between those processes which happen to rise above the threshold of our ordinary consciousness — which become super-liminal — and those processes which happen to remain sub-liminal throughout our whole bodily life? 1891, Frederic William Henry Myers, The Principles of Psychology, page 118:

Forms

Antonyms

subliminal

Relateds

superluminal