Algedonics

Interactions of mental states with one another, or changing relations of the organism and the environment, determine all sorts of changes in the quality of the mental states as regards pleasure and pain. To show how these changes come about is to obtain the laws of "algedonics."

The conception of algedonics interests the physician, then, as far as it helps him to attempt to distinguish between a psychic or physical origin for the headache.

In that work there was presented for examination a theory of Algedonics which seemed more adequate to account for our pleasure-pain experiences than any I had met with in the published works of other students of the subject, and which appeared to avoid the difficulties that had heretofore availed to discredit the hedonic theory of Aesthetics.

Marshall viewed aesthetics as a special branch of introspective psychology dealing with algedonics, the science of pleasure and pain.

The plant is adaptive to environmental changes (we have discussed how this could be done through algedonics). But the built-in control systems keep going wrong.

The final point introduces the idea of 'algedonics' (from the Greek 'aldos', meaning pain, and 'hedos', or pleasure), a signal produced by a statistically recognised event, which is so important that it bypasses the usual channels and gets sent directly to S5.

The information is transferred from S3 to S4, in the form of “algedonics” (dashed line between S3 and S4 in Figure 3).