Find over 25,000 psychological definitions


inspiration

n.

1. the act of drawing air into the lungs.

2. in cognitive psychology, a sudden insight or leap in understanding that produces new, creative ideas or approaches to a problem. See aha experience; discontinuity hypothesis.

3. the process of being aroused or stimulated to do something, or the quality of being so aroused, as in Her speech gave us the inspiration we needed. —inspirational adj. —inspire vb. —inspired adj.

Browse dictionary by letter

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Psychology term of the day

January 30th 2025

Gödel’s proof

Gödel’s proof

a proof that in any logic system at least as powerful as arithmetic it is possible to state theorems that can be proved to be neither true nor false, using only the proof rules of that system. Published in 1931, this incompleteness result was very challenging to the mathematics of the time. British mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954), with his proof of the undecidability of the halting problem, extended this result to computation (see Turing machine). [Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), Austrian-born U.S. mathematician]