Laws of Seeing (Mit Press) - Visual Perception Book for Artists, Designers & Psychologists - Perfect for Studio, Classroom & Research

Stay tuned for a longer review. [Update Sept 13, 2011. see below] I think it is great that there is so much new information about Gestalt Psychology being published in English. Perceptual and cognitive scientists will find great "new" ideas in Metzger's work. The book has instant credibility as far as I'm concerned because Lothar Spillmann and Michael Wertheimer were involved in the translation.Two other books on Gestalt thinkers that I recommend highly:Michael Wertheimer's book (coauthored by Brett King) on Max Wertheimer and Gestalt Psychology.Ley's book on Wolfgang Kohler and the Apes of Tenerife."Laws of Seeing" (Metzger) contains many ideas that will be readily identified with other eminent Gestalt scholars (e.g., Wertheimer, Koffka, Kohler), but contains remarkable "new" insights about a wide variety of perceptual phenomena. The "laws of seeing" are Gestalt laws, under the umbrella of the famous law of pragnanz, "which holds that stimuli organize themselves in the simplest, most symmetrical, and balanced manner." It anticipates a wide variety of phenomena (e.g., shape from shading) that were of great interest to later researchers. It is a small cloth-bound book, but contains an enormous amount of information in its text, illustrations, and many black and white photos.Metzger's photos and illustrations are among the crowning achievements of this book, in that they capture essential aspects of the gestalt principles in ways that have, in some cases, been forgotten until now.Spillman writes, "It makes one wonder what course research into vision and perception might have taken had this book been available to the English-speaking scientific community at the time of its writing. Many a rediscovery could have been saved, for example in the fields of shape-from-motion, depth-from-shading, context dependency, and viewpoint invariance, because the facts were known already several decades before. Take perception of isoluminant stimuli, which Susanne Liebmann reported in 1929. It is astonishing to find such a treasure trove of perceptual observations that, in the English-speaking world, have been known to so few."Metzger concludes with a certain bravado regarding the primacy of psychology, observation and perceptual science, which is heartening. Here's a portion of his conclusion: "...even our spirit, and with it our peceptual experience, is an integral part of nature. True, it is a very special and certainly not the simplest part of nature, but in any case it is the only one that is immediately given to us. Every other science myst satisfy itself with indirect copies and representations of things, and those representations emerge in us only at the end of a long and complicated chain, by way of light waves or sound waves, through stimulus receptors on the body's surface, and through longer or shorter neural pathways, along which a good deal of information is lost along the way, or filtered out or distorted through the processing laws of the transmitting media. If this is so, then surely psychology offers more reliable information about the essence of being thanany other realm of knowledge, if we only try to look at things correctly and not let ourselves be led astray by the limited and indirect information of other sciences."[Update Sept 13, 2011. First off, I neglected to note that one of the translators was Steven Lehar. Lehar is not well known in academia, but he should be. He's certainly knowledgeable about gestalt psychology, and a brilliant modern gestalt psychologist, IMHO. So the fact that he was involved in the translation is very good news. Check out his books and his website -- well worth the look.]