INSIGHT

in learning theory, immediate and clear learning or understanding that takes place without overt trial-and-error testing behaviour. A good deal of the scientific knowledge concerning insight phenomena derives from work on animal behaviour that was conducted by the 20th-century German Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Khler. In one experiment Khler placed a banana outside the cage of a hungry chimpanzee, Sultan, and gave the animal two sticks, each too short for pulling in the food but joinable to make a single stick of sufficient length. Sultan alternately tried unsuccessfully to use each stick, and he even used one stick to push the other along to touch the banana. Later, after apparently having given up, Sultan accidentally joined the sticks, observed the result, and immediately ran with the longer tool to retrieve the banana. The solution reappeared immediately when the problem was repeated. This result, however, is ambiguous. A number of already conditioned responses appear to have been brought to the problem, so that the necessary motor skills were already available once Sultan accidentally rearranged the sticks. Insight is experienced in human learning, of course, but, as with Sultan, only in situations in which already acquired responses are seen to be applicable when the stimulus properties of the situation are rearranged. Insight is also considered essential to certain methods of psychotherapy, particularly psychoanalysis, in which achieving new understanding of the unconscious motives and bases of pathological behaviour is thought an important step toward recovery.