Gestalt
A theory of mind and brain functioning which claims that the operational principles of perception and cognition are self-organizing, with holistic tendences. The word gestalt is German for “a unified or meaningful whole.” The Gestalt effect refers to the natural tendency of the mind to perceive whole pictures instead of just a partial collection of lines, curves, colors or other sensory data. Gestalt psychology is also called the Gestalt theory of the Berlin School for Max Wertheimer, Ernst Mach, Christian von Ehrenfels, Oswald Kulpe and other notable German philosophers and psychologists who founded the theory during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.
The most basic rule of Gestalt is the law of prägnanz, which says that we try to experience things in as good a Gestalt way as possible, i.e. as regular, orderly, simplistic, symmetrical, etc. The other Gestalt laws are: the Law of Closure - our mind adds missing elements to complete a figure; the Law of Similarity - our mind groups similar elements to an entity (similarity depends on relationships constructed about form, color, size and brightness of the elements); the Law of Symmetry - symmetrical images are seen as belonging together regardless of their distance; the Law of Continuity - the mind continues a pattern, even after it stops; the Law of Common Fate - elements with the same moving direction are seen as a unit, and; the Law of Proximity - regional or chronological closeness of elements are grouped by our mind and seen as belonging together. Further, there is a tendency to perceive one aspect of an event as the figure or foreground and the other as the ground or background, as in the classic illustrations provided below (the Necker Cube and Rubin’s Vase), which demonstrate multi-stability, or the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to pop back and forth unstably between two or more alternative interpretations.
Under Gestalt theory, these laws not only apply to perception of images, but to thought processes, memories, and our understanding of time. Max Wertheimer, who is considered to be the founder of Gestalt psychology, considered thinking to happen in two ways: productive and reproductive. Productive thinking is solving a problem with fresh insight. Reproductive thinking is solving a problem based on previous experience and related conditioned patterns of thinking and perceiving. The Gestalt school was interested in exploring the degree to which human perception, cognition and memory involve conscious and unconscious tendencies that distort objective reality.
