J 0 rgen Weber The Judgement of the Eye

J 0 rgen Weber The Judgement of the Eye

Jiirgen Weber The J udgement of the Eye The Metamorphoses of Geometry - One of the Sources of Visual Perception and Consciousness (A Further Development of Gestalt Psychology) Springer-Verlag Wien GmbH

ISBN 978-3-211-83768-9 DOI 10.1007/978-3-7091-6112-8 ISBN 978-3-7091-6112-8 (ebook)

PREFACE

Preface 6 PART I Geometric Concepts of the Visual Cortex as the Basis of Visual Information Chapter 1 Short Summary of the Main Ideas Chapter 2 What Is Seeing? How Visual Memory Is Affected by Agnosia and Alzheimer's Disease Chapter 3 What Do Infants Recognize and What Do Their Visual Memories Look Like? Chapter 4 The Conclusions of Gestalt Psychology and Its Limitations Chapter 5 My Question: How Do Forms Convey Content; Are There Visual Categories of Expression? Chapter 6 The Rosette Chapter 7 Contraction and Expansion Chapter 8 The Classification of Memory Pictures by Students. Reproduction Memory - Identification Memory Chapter 9 The "Orbits" and Their Application Chapter 10 The Start of Ornamentation All over the World and at All Times Chapter 11 Actual Enlargement and Reduction Chapter 12 Rotated Surfaces 9 10 14 19 21 29 32 49 62 65 69 74 PART II Chapter l3 Form and Movement Chapter 14 The Metamorphosis of Geometry in Egyptian Art Chapter 15 The Metamorphoses of Geometry in the Painting and Sculpture of Greece Chapter 16 Movement Schemata Chapter 17 And Once Again the Visual Memory Chapter 18 So-called Naturalism Summing-up Bibliography Index Figures 81 89 92 96 101 102 110 114 116 ll8 5

This book is essentially about the question of what forms say to us, what information they convey about their very existence, how we understand their language. How does their expression come about? Gestalt psychology, neurophysiology and the psychology of perception have hitherto tried to answer the question of whether we see forms as a whole or as the sum of their parts, why as a rule we perceive things as they actually are and not as they appear on the retina, which is in fact changed in perspective and in size, and which visual cortical areas and which neurons react to which phenomena. But the most important question for me is what the thing that is seen informs us additionally. How do we tell the difference between a cheerful and a gloomy face? Why do we see that a bud will open shortly? Why do we find some phenomena to be dangerous and others to be desirable? This question has not yet been investigated in a systematic and scientific way, although it is of vital importance to our behaviour, to our attitude towards the things we see. Apart from this, it is able to bring together the results of various disciplines and answer many an old question, e.g. the one about spatial, three-dimensional perception. This is, of course, the most central issue for an artist, who, after all, wants to inform his fellow beings about the forms he has invented. The essential issue for him is to do with his creations' expression. In this respect no-one has undertaken as many experiments as he. A good many discussions with others could also be of help though: For more than 20 years I maintained a constant dialogue with Rudolf Arnheim. Over and above the literature on gestalt psychology these very discussions brought me close to the essence of this academic field. Thanks are due to many others, for instance the psychologist Professor Ernst Poppel and Professor Singer, the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, for certain ideas and not least to my assistants and students for their questions. I would particularly like to thank the psychologist Dr Klaus Nippert of the Technical University of Braunschweig, who patiently filled the gaps in my knowledge of psychology again and again. I am grateful to him for many literary references. Many people have worked on this book, translators, secretarial staff. I would like to express my thanks to them for patiently revising my constant- 1y changing texts, so that finally, after ten years, this, my second work, on this subject, has been written. I would be pleased if my reflections about a function of visual perception, perceptual judgement, my experience as an artist would stimulate some related academic fields. Braunschweig, April 2002 Firstly and most importantly I talked to my father, H. H. Weber, the former Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physiology in Heidelberg. These discussions were often controversial, as are my talks on the same subject with the current Director of this Max Planck Institute, Bert Sakmann. These came about when I was doing his portrait for the Gallery of the Max Planck Society. I gained a great deal from these conflicting views on the one hand, but on the other hand they also helped me to make my own thoughts more precise. I am grateful to both men for this. 7