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3 Gestalt
When you set your eyes on an object such as a chair, you notice immediately
that every part of the object is present in your field of vision at the same time.
The back, the arms, the seat, the legs—all exist simultaneously in the field of
your awareness. You are also alert to the object’s color and surface gloss, as
well as to quirks of the object’s shape. You experience all these things together,
configured in a pattern that you understand. You experience the Gestalt image
of the chair.
The animal brain—unlike any manmade computing device—stores and
uses knowledge in the form of structured wholes. This kind of knowledge is
the very antithesis of the sort of knowledge or information recognized and
processed by computers. Computers organize data “from the bottom up:” For
a machine, a picture is a matrix of dots, or “pixels”. When you look at the
picture you see an image, because you have Gestalt vision—but the computer
sees nothing more than the dots, which it must blindly process according to
fixed instructions. A brain, even in the simplest organism, is wholly unlike any
computing machine that has ever existed. It is designed to process Gestalts
whole, without decomposing them into rudimentary component parts. 2
The undivided Gestalt whole is not merely the fundamental unit of perception, it is the basic unit of thought as well. This claim hardly requires justification, because solving a problem or producing a rational argument clearly
involves having whole ideas or images in mind. There isn’t a task, no matter
how ordinary, that doesn’t require some planning in which a whole context is
visualized. Even to sweep my deck I must call to mind where the broom is,
decide which side of the deck to begin and which way to sweep. Every waking
moment we are seeing, hearing and judging in complete thoughts.
A Gestalt portrays objects laid out in space so that collectively they make
sense as one compound unit. A landscape or a portrait are meant to be apprehended whole. They consist of separate elements composed together which
convey the different parts individually as well as in relation to one another,
and at the same time reveal the whole as an indivisible composite that we
behold without analyzing it. Also, perhaps more importantly, Gestalts show
events unfolding in time in a form which is coherent and organized. Thus,
when we witness an event, for example a book falling off a desk, we experience
it as a unitary incident, describable as “book falling-off desk”, but the event
isn’t three things, it is one. That is the very essence of a Gestalt: If you analyze
it there are several components, but it is apprehended in mind as an unbroken
unit of meaning.
Just as Gestalts permit you to see multiple objects side by side at the same
moment, it likewise permits you to perceive objects and events that evolve over
a duration of time. When listening to music, you hear more than just the note
3 Gestalt
When you set your eyes on an object such as a chair, you notice immediately
that every part of the object is present in your field of vision at the same time.
The back, the arms, the seat, the legs—all exist simultaneously in the field of
your awareness. You are also alert to the object’s color and surface gloss, as
well as to quirks of the object’s shape. You experience all these things together,
configured in a pattern that you understand. You experience the Gestalt image
of the chair.
The animal brain—unlike any manmade computing device—stores and
uses knowledge in the form of structured wholes. This kind of knowledge is
the very antithesis of the sort of knowledge or information recognized and
processed by computers. Computers organize data “from the bottom up:” For
a machine, a picture is a matrix of dots, or “pixels”. When you look at the
picture you see an image, because you have Gestalt vision—but the computer
sees nothing more than the dots, which it must blindly process according to
fixed instructions. A brain, even in the simplest organism, is wholly unlike any
computing machine that has ever existed. It is designed to process Gestalts
whole, without decomposing them into rudimentary component parts. 2
The undivided Gestalt whole is not merely the fundamental unit of perception, it is the basic unit of thought as well. This claim hardly requires justification, because solving a problem or producing a rational argument clearly
involves having whole ideas or images in mind. There isn’t a task, no matter
how ordinary, that doesn’t require some planning in which a whole context is
visualized. Even to sweep my deck I must call to mind where the broom is,
decide which side of the deck to begin and which way to sweep. Every waking
moment we are seeing, hearing and judging in complete thoughts.
A Gestalt portrays objects laid out in space so that collectively they make
sense as one compound unit. A landscape or a portrait are meant to be apprehended whole. They consist of separate elements composed together which
convey the different parts individually as well as in relation to one another,
and at the same time reveal the whole as an indivisible composite that we
behold without analyzing it. Also, perhaps more importantly, Gestalts show
events unfolding in time in a form which is coherent and organized. Thus,
when we witness an event, for example a book falling off a desk, we experience
it as a unitary incident, describable as “book falling-off desk”, but the event
isn’t three things, it is one. That is the very essence of a Gestalt: If you analyze
it there are several components, but it is apprehended in mind as an unbroken
unit of meaning.
Just as Gestalts permit you to see multiple objects side by side at the same
moment, it likewise permits you to perceive objects and events that evolve over
a duration of time. When listening to music, you hear more than just the note