The pharyngeal reflex or gag reflex (also known as a laryngeal spasm) is a reflex contraction of the back of the throat, evoked by touching the roof of your mouth, the back of your tongue, the area around your tonsils and the back of your throat. It, along with other aero digestive reflexes such as reflexive pharyngeal swallowing, prevents something from entering the throat except as part of normal swallowing and helps prevent choking.
Read more about Pharyngeal Reflex: Reflex Arc, Suppression and Activation, Its Absence, Reflexive Pharyngeal Swallow
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“No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)