“[Thinking] respond to an objective constellation of millions of stimuli by developing, first of all, an organised field, many and perhaps the most essential properties of which have no physical partner among the single stimuli.”

—  Wolfgang Köhler

Source: Gestalt Psychology. 1930, p. 137

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "[Thinking] respond to an objective constellation of millions of stimuli by developing, first of all, an organised field…" by Wolfgang Köhler?
Wolfgang Köhler photo
Wolfgang Köhler12
German-American psychologist and phenomenologist 1887–1967

Related quotes

Roger Shepard photo

“Most studies employing three-dimensional objects as stimuli have used simultaneous presentation whereas most studies employing two-dimensional objects have used comparison of a single visual stimulus with a memory presentation. We suspect that it is this procedural difference rather than the difference in dimensionality that is the principal determiner of rate of mental rotation.”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

Source: Mental images and their transformations. 1982, p. 178; as cited in Niall (1997)

Maria Montessori photo

“If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to 'things' and desires to posses them.”

Maria Montessori (1870–1952) Italian pedagogue, philosopher and physician

Source: The Secret of Childhood (1936), Ch. 23

Napoleon Hill photo

“Sex energy is the most powerful of all the stimuli which move people into action. Because it is the most powerful of the emotions, it must be controlled, through transmutation, and converted into other channels.”

Napoleon Hill book Think and Grow Rich

Think and Grow Rich (1938)

Herbert A. Simon photo

“Organizations and institutions provide the general stimuli and attention-directors that channelize the behaviors of the members of the group, and that provide those members with the intermediate objectives that stimulate action.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 100.

“The severe restrictions which Wundt placed on introspection also manifest themselves in the types of judgment that his experimental subjects were required to make. In accordance with the precept that internal perception can only become observation insofar as it is linked to controllable external stimuli, the introspective reports from his laboratory are very largely limited to judgments of size, intensity, and duration of physical stimuli, supplemented at times by judgments of their simultaneity and succession.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: "The history of introspection reconsidered." 1980, p. 247

António Damásio photo

“Emotions are triggered by what we like to call emotionally competent stimuli, that is, objects or situations that can be real, like in front of you, or be in your mind when you think and you recall, and they act on brain devices that were designed by evolution.”

António Damásio (1944) neuroscientist and professor at the University of Southern California

Antonio Damasio, Brain and mind from medicine to society 1/2, Open University of Catalonia, 2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbacW1HVZVk

Jorge Luis Borges photo

“In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Other Inquisitions

"Nathaniel Hawthorne"
Other Inquisitions (1952)

“It is essential to realize at this point that the formalism to be developed, although we cast it initially primarily in the framework of natural systems, is in fact applicable to any situation in which a class of objects is associated with real numbers, or in fact classified or indexed by any set whatever. It is thus applicable to any situation in which classification, or recognition, or discrimination is involved; indeed, one of the aims of our formalism is to point up the essential equivalence of the measurement problem in physics with all types of recognition or classification mechanisms based on observable properties of the objects being recognized or classified.”

Robert Rosen (1934–1998) American theoretical biologist

Source: Fundamentals of measurement and representation of natural systems. (1978), Ch. 2. The Basic Formalism; Quoted in: Mikulecky, Donald C. " Robert Rosen: the well‐posed question and its answer‐why are organisms different from machines? http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html." Systems Research and Behavioral Science 17.5 (2000): 419-432.

Samuel Butler photo

“For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 12

E. W. Hobson photo

“The objects of abstract Geometry possess in absolute precision properties which are only approximately realized in the corresponding objects of physical Geometry.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), p. 5

Related topics