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80 Creativity

spaces. Cycles of selection, look-ahead and evaluation occur in the context of
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a well-defined search space. How does the problem solver construct that space?
even more important, how does the problem solver move from one problem
space to another? This question was considered in a third tradition with a very
different focus.

Novelty Through restructuring
Novelty is possible because an object, event or situation does not uniquely deter-
mine its own representation. every representation is an interpretation, and there
are always alternative interpretations. Moving sideways from one representation
to another might activate dormant but useful knowledge, suggest unheeded action
possibilities or reveal previously unsuspected connections. representational
change theories have to specify the kind of representation that is changing, the
nature of the change process and the relevant triggering conditions.
in the final years of the 19th century, the German psychologist Max
Wertheimer – yet another contemporary of Poincaré – and two of his students,
Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, formulated a representational change theory
based on the observation that a person’s perception of a situation is not a collage of
perceptual features but can be said to have a Gestalt. The difficulty of translating
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the German word “Gestalt” – neither “structure“ nor “configuration“ is entirely
satisfactory – has been avoided by each generation of english-speaking psycholo-
gists by assimilating the word itself into english. to a first approximation, the
Gestalt of a situation is the totality of the relations between its parts. a Gestalt is
neither entirely subjective nor entirely objective, but resides in the perceptual field,
a phenomenological construct that is best understood as the interface between
the mind and the world. The organization that a Gestalt imposes on perception
is subject to laws of organization that belong to the perceptual field itself. The lat-
ter include completeness, proximity, symmetry, good continuation and several
others that can be found in most psychology textbooks. Their insistence that
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any object, event or situation must be understood as an integrated whole earned
Wertheimer and his colleagues the label Gestalt psychologists.
The holistic nature of Gestalts is illustrated by the well-known revers-
ible figures that often appear in psychology textbooks. The Necker Cube
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is an example; see Figure 3.4. if a person looks intently at this picture, his
perception flips back and forth between seeing the cube in one or another
spatial orientation. Such reversals are neither entirely objective nor entirely
subjective. The material picture remains unchanged but the possibility of
reversal depends on its properties. Not every picture flips, but those that