The structure of their brains is more closely related to the chemistry of the human body and brain-structure than to the chemical nature of the lower apes.

Wolfgang Köhler

Psychologists

Wolfgang Köhler

German-American psychologist and a founder of Gestalt psychology (1887-1967). From 1913 to 1917 on Tenerife he showed that chimpanzees solve problems by insight rather than by trial and error, a turning point for the psychology of thinking. As director of the Berlin Psychological Institute he led the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology for fifteen years until 1935. Under Nazi rule in 1933 he openly attacked the regime in the last legally published anti-Nazi article and ultimately emigrated to the United States in 1935, teaching at Swarthmore College for twenty years and serving as president of the American Psychological Association in 1956.

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