Triune Theory

Sensory psychology, affective science, and behavioral economics have each documented adaptationprocesses whereby responses to sustained stimuli or life events diminish over time[2]. Classicpsychophysics experiments led to Weber’s law and Fechner’s law, which state that perceived intensitychanges are proportional to relative stimulus change – formally, sensation scales as a logarithm of stimulusintensity[1]. Separately, research on well-being finds that people “get used to” both good and bad lifeevents – a phenomenon known as the hedonic treadmill or hedonic adaptation[2]. In parallel, decisionresearch (prospect theory) revealed that people evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point (e.g.current wealth or expectations) and exhibit loss aversion, meaning losses have a greater emotional impactthan equivalent gains[3]. Neurophysiological studies provide a unifying clue: neurons often respondvigorously to changes in stimulation or reward but then adapt their firing over time. For example,midbrain dopamine neurons fire bursts when an unexpected reward is received and pause when anexpected reward is omitted[6], encoding deviations from an adaptive baseline prediction. Such convergingevidence hints that a single quantitative law may govern how stimuli are registered relative to changingreference states across sensory, emotional, and cognitive systems. Here we introduce a unified model thatintegrates these ideas, and we analyze how it reproduces key cross-domain phenomena with a compact setof parameters.