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isohedonic trap

the flaw in Daniel E. Berlyne’s theory of aesthetic preference (see arousal potential) that stimuli producing equal amounts of arousal should be equally preferred. Given that equal amounts of arousal can be produced by pleasing or displeasing stimuli, this cannot be the case.

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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]