Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [196]
In one of those books, The Growth of the Mind, published in German in 1921 and English in 1924, Koffka reviewed existing knowledge about mental development from a Gestaltist viewpoint. Of the many new ideas and interpretations he offered, two stand out.
The first: Instinctive behavior is not a chain of reflexive responses mechanically triggered by a stimulus; rather, it is a group or pattern of reflexes—a Gestalt imposed by the creature on its own actions—aimed at achieving a particular goal. A young chick pecks at certain things that it “knows” are edible, but the instinct is goal-oriented, driven by hunger, not a mechanical and automatic response to the sight of food.35 The chick does not peck when sated, despite the sight of food and the existence of the reflex.
The second: Against the behaviorist doctrine that all learning consists of chains of associations created by rewards, Koffka argued that much learning takes place through the processes of organization and reorganization in the mind in advance of reward; he offered as proof Köhler’s studies of problem solving by apes and comparable data on problem solving by children. But the exact cause of those organizing processes, he admitted, was not yet known.
Fourteen years later, in Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935), a heroic attempt to review all existing knowledge of psychology from a Gestaltist viewpoint, Koffka was ready to offer a theory as to the cause of the organization and reorganization in the mind. The theory, elaborated from one originally proposed by Köhler, was that “psychophysical” forces inherent in the brain—neuronal energy fields—act like the force fields elsewhere in nature that always seek the simplest or best-fitting configuration (as in, again, the bubble, or the lines of force in a magnetic field). Hence the mind’s tendency to construct and reconstruct information in the form of “good Gestalten.”36
But are those good Gestalten faithful representations of the outside world? Koffka gave a resounding affirmative to this ancient question. He offered the theory, suggested by Wertheimer and developed by Köhler, that our thoughts about the world are isomorphic with the world itself— they are brain events that are, in some way, similar in structure to the external things they represent. If we see two separate lights, there are two separate areas of brain excitation; if we see movement, there is a corresponding movement in the field of arousal in the brain.37 The contents of the mind are not something wholly unlike the outside world but a neural simulacrum of it.
This solved the classic problem of how thought, a different kind of phenomenon from the material world, could represent that world. Or so it seemed to Koffka and his colleagues. But in the 1950s Karl Lashley and other neurophysiologists conducted experiments designed to interrupt the supposed electrical fields of isomorphic theory. They implanted mica plates in the visual cortex of some animals and in others placed silver foil on the surface of the brain, short-circuiting the different electrical potentials that were supposed to simulate the perceived world. In neither case did the animals respond differently to visual experiences; isomorphism and force field theory was effectively scuttled.38
Yet if force field theory is viewed not as a physiological reality but as an illuminating metaphor, it has genuine value. It says that in a manner analogous to the operation of force fields, we group, categorize, and reorganize our experiences, always seeking the simplest and most meaningful constructs of the contents of our mind. As a guiding image, this comes closer than associationism, conditioning, or any earlier epistemological