Heinrich Klüver

Heinrich Klüver (; May 25, 1897 – February 8, 1979) was a German-American biological psychologist and philosopher born in Holstein.

After serving in the Imperial German Army during World War I, Klüver studied at both the University of Hamburg and the University of Berlin from 1920 to 1923. In the latter year, he arrived in the United States and earned his Ph.D. in physiological psychology from Stanford University. Then in 1927, he married Cessa Feyerabend and settled in the United States permanently, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1934. Klüver was a member of the 'core group' of cybernetics pioneers that participated in the Macy Conferences in the 1940s and 1950s. He collaborated most often and fruitfully with Paul Bucy and made various contributions to neuroanatomy, the most notable being Klüver–Bucy syndrome.

Klüver's expositions of and experiments with mescaline were also groundbreaking at the time. In the 1920s, he coined the term "cobweb figure" to describe one of the four form constant geometric visual hallucinations experienced in the early stage of a mescaline trip. He described this experience as, "colored threads running together in a revolving center, the whole similar to a cobweb". Other forms of geometric visual hallucinations include the chessboard design, tunnel, and spiral. Klüver wrote that "many 'atypical' visions are upon close inspection nothing but variations of these form-constants."

Klüver was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Provided by Wikipedia