Customer Reviews

The World in Your Head: A Gestalt View of the Mechanism of Conscious Experience

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I don't know Steven Lehar. We've corresponded a couple times about other matters via e-mail, but that's it. I don't write solicited reviews, and this is no exception. At some point, I searched online and found Lehar's website, with its interesting text and beautiful graphics. It was obvious to me that Lehar is doing something unique, creative and important, albeit way out of the current mainstream. That led me to purchase his book here (Oops. Apparently you can get it for less by ordering from the publisher).

I'm wondering why this isn't a classic yet. OK, well, honestly, I'm just getting started with this book, but what I'm finding is amazing. The text seems crisp and well-written. Lehar is addressing issues that I've wondered about for years. The figures are beautiful and informative. (Take a look at the color images at the author's website). I'll have more to say once I get deeper into the text.

Make sure to take a look at Lehar's online material. His "cartoon epistemology" is brilliant for its simplicity, humor, artistic flair and importance. You can read about Lehar's theory online, and gain access to color illustrations that resemble the black and white ones from the book.

This is truly the best of times and the worst of times for the perceptual and neural sciences. The toys (like fMRI and multi-electrode EEGs) have become more sophisticated and powerful, and there have been many new discoveries. If you are a workhorse who can churn out data, publications, and grant proposals, you are relatively safe. But at the same time, the field has not been kind to rogue scientific thinkers, no matter how brilliant. Many modern academics seem not to give themselves much time to think, or to pay attention to thinkers. This book may well be a gem, waiting to be discovered.

(My only complaint is that the text in the book is SMALL. I actually purchased some reading glasses to make it easier to read this book. Is this what if feels like to be.... old???)

At least one other person seems to share my assessment of this book -- Hellmuth Metz-Göckel (Universität Dortmund). He writes, "The theory that LEHAR presents here is unusually stimulating, and can certainly be seen as the most important contemporary contribution to Gestalt theory and its further development. Much of it is - as the author concedes - speculative, but when one considers the facts, his considerations are characterized by a high plausibility and rigor. If one wishes to clear up the manifold phenomena, there remains only one possibility, as the presented theory offers. It remains to be seen which and how much resonance the resonance theory will find in the scientific literature. It has certainly earned it."

I think we may be ripe for a rediscovery of Gestalt ideas. I've written some reviews of other three recent Gestalt offerings. See my profile/reviews.

I started on the biological side of vision but my career has taken me firmly on the machine or computer vision side of the aisle (Plug, I just wrote an O'Reilly book on the topic: Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV Library). But, I still love thinking and reading about brain science.

In this book Steve Lehar has combined Gestalt psychology and computational models of perception and learning into a whirl win tour of the brain. His scientific views are, um, probably a bit out there. You can accept them or not, but the real pleasure of this book come in where he marshals evidence to defend his views -- you get to go along for the ride on an extensive tour of the latest in experimental psychology, brain science and philosophy. It's a very enlightening, entertaining read, suitable also for people not in the field and, as a bonus, Steve is simply a great graphic artist -- the illustrations are worth the price of entry alone.