Interesting Resources for Chapter 2

For each chapter in Finding Ghosts in Your Data, I’ll include a few resources that I found interesting. This isn’t a bibliography, strictly speaking, as I might not use all of these in the course of writing, but they were at least worth noting.

Books

• Gestalt in Photography by Aischa Erten. I have a book review of it up and can recommend it without reservation.
• Principles of Gestalt Psychology by Kurt Koffka. This is a beefy book, at over 600 pages. Koffka wrote it in 1935, acting as a summary of what the Gestalt psychologists believed. It also acts as a critique of some of the other schools of thought from the time. Koffka writes quite well, without the English language tics you commonly see from German intellectuals of that era. That said, the book assumes that you are already fairly well-versed in psychology.
• The Sensory Order by FA Hayek. This was during Hayek’s “shunned in the world of economics” period, in which he dusted off a work he’d written in the 1920s but never published. The book is a great summary of continental psychology and theory around sensory processing, anticipating the neural processing concepts which would bear fruit in the ’50s and ’60s.

Articles

• A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception by Johan Wagemans, et al. This paper summarizes the rise, fall, re-rise, re-fall, and re-re-rise of the Berlin Gestalt school. Not everything in the Gestalt world is “canon” for psychologists today, and the paper gives us a good idea of what most people accept and what is unlikely to be accurate.
• Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung by Max Wertheimer. Finding a copy of this online is…difficult. But it was republished in English in Thorne Shipley’s Classics in Psychology, available from the Internet Archive. In that version, Wertheimer’s work starts on page 1032. You can also buy a used copy of Classics in Psychology for cheap.

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