Wolfgang Köhler is a German-American psychologist, one of the leaders of Gestalt psychology. (1887-1967).
Experimentally proved in experiments on animals (“study of the intellect of great apes”, 1917) the role of insight as a principle of organization of behavior. According to Koehler, with the successful solution of an intellectual problem, the situation as a whole is seen and transformed into a gestalt, as a result of which the nature of adaptive reactions changes. Koehler’s research expanded the scope of ideas about the nature of skills and new forms of human and animal behavior. Koehler studied the phenomenon of transposition, which is based on the body’s reactions not to separate, disparate stimuli, but to their ratio. He believed that psychological knowledge should be built on the model of physical knowledge, since the processes in the mind and the body as a material system are in one-to-one correspondence (isomorphism). Guided by this idea, he extended the concept of gestalt to the brain. This prompted Kohler’s followers to postulate the presence of electric fields in the brain, which serve as a correlate of mental gestalts in the perception of external objects.