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The Production of Novelty 81

Figure 3.4. The Necker Cube. Sustained
attention causes the cube to flip between two
possible spatial orientations.

do alternate between the same two possibilities for every viewer. in a rever-
sal, every part acquires a new meaning within the figure. a reversal is also
non-monotonic: it is not possible to see the two spatial orientations of the
cube simultaneously. We see the figure one way or the other, and when it
flips, the previous view temporarily disappears from consciousness. We can
only access it by waiting until the figure flips back. The reversal happens in
a subjective instant and we have no introspective access to the mechanism.
The Gestalt psychologists called this process Umstrukturierung, a word that
has been rendered into english as both restructuring and reorganization by
different translators.
a central but peculiar aspect of the Gestalters’ theory is that some Gestalts
are better – better balanced, more harmonious, more stable – than others.
The introduction of a value judgment into a supposedly descriptive theory
of how the mind works was natural within the 19th-century German philo-
sophical tradition in which Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka were trained but
runs counter to the naturalistic stance of contemporary cognitive psychology.
This aspect of their theory cannot be purged because the striving for a better
Gestalt gives the restructuring process its direction. reversible figures move
back and forth between equally good Gestalts but they are atypical. in the
normal case, the mind moves up the goodness gradient, from worse to better
Gestalts.
The Gestalters developed these concepts in the course of their studies of per-
ception but then turned around and cast them as a theory of thinking. a prob-
lem is a problem because its Gestalt is incomplete or imbalanced; it suffers from
gaps and tensions; the problem solver has not parsed the situation into the most