Mental Life Gets Organized
31
currently being played: You hear a whole melody. When someone speaks you
hear a whole sentence. Gestalts bring into being an entire aspect of reality that
would not exist otherwise—a reality in which many things which are separated
in space and time are perceived together as a new combined entity. The new
entity did not exist before the parts were perceived as one.
When we look at an object in motion we see it moving, and this takes a small
amount of time, perhaps a quarter of a second, or a little more or less. In the
perception of living beings there is no such thing as instantaneous motion: That
is an abstraction of physics. What we perceive is the gradual displacement of
an object. In a single frame of awareness, we are experiencing gradual change.
That is possible only for an organism that perceives in Gestalts.
Not only higher animals, but even the tiniest insects perceive motion. In
addition, experiments show that they recognize patterns and are able to distinguish even small variations between them. Ample evidence proves that they
perceive Gestalt wholes in space and in time. Insects even have internal Gestalt
images of objects. This fact was brought to light in a 2020 experiment reported
in the journal Science. 3 From the article, the authors “found that bees could
identify objects by shape in the dark if they had seen but not touched them
in the light.” In order to achieve this, the insect must have retained a visual
image of the object, and even recognized the same Gestalt image by touch.
When a story is told, the incidents of the story-line unfold one by one, yet
in a listener’s mind a coherent narrative comes together in stages until the story
is complete. It is then present in mind as a single narrative unit. This fact has
been confirmed time and time again in psychological experiments, in which it
is found that a short time after listening to a narrative, what a listener recalls is
the gist of the story—not the wording and not the details. The gist of a story
is an archetypal example of what a Gestalt is. It coheres together in memory as
a single unit. It may be unspooled when retelling it, but while doing that you
are keeping the gist in sight, for it’s the source of what you’re reciting.
The value of a gist for retaining things in memory has been known for a
long time. In the 1960s cognitive psychologists used the word chunking to
describe a process of binding together different items to form a meaningful
whole which is easily remembered. The reason this is possible is that once a
Gestalt is formed, it hangs together tightly as a single unit of thought. It is
stored as a single unit, and emerges into consciousness as a single unit. Yet a
Gestalt, like a panoramic landscape, may be very rich in content.
Human memory is a remarkable process which is not fully understood.
Possibly, what our brain commits to memory is not an exact portrayal of what
we wish to recall, but rather the steps through which it was encoded. To retrieve
the memory, we go through the encoding process in reverse. This is very likely
31
currently being played: You hear a whole melody. When someone speaks you
hear a whole sentence. Gestalts bring into being an entire aspect of reality that
would not exist otherwise—a reality in which many things which are separated
in space and time are perceived together as a new combined entity. The new
entity did not exist before the parts were perceived as one.
When we look at an object in motion we see it moving, and this takes a small
amount of time, perhaps a quarter of a second, or a little more or less. In the
perception of living beings there is no such thing as instantaneous motion: That
is an abstraction of physics. What we perceive is the gradual displacement of
an object. In a single frame of awareness, we are experiencing gradual change.
That is possible only for an organism that perceives in Gestalts.
Not only higher animals, but even the tiniest insects perceive motion. In
addition, experiments show that they recognize patterns and are able to distinguish even small variations between them. Ample evidence proves that they
perceive Gestalt wholes in space and in time. Insects even have internal Gestalt
images of objects. This fact was brought to light in a 2020 experiment reported
in the journal Science. 3 From the article, the authors “found that bees could
identify objects by shape in the dark if they had seen but not touched them
in the light.” In order to achieve this, the insect must have retained a visual
image of the object, and even recognized the same Gestalt image by touch.
When a story is told, the incidents of the story-line unfold one by one, yet
in a listener’s mind a coherent narrative comes together in stages until the story
is complete. It is then present in mind as a single narrative unit. This fact has
been confirmed time and time again in psychological experiments, in which it
is found that a short time after listening to a narrative, what a listener recalls is
the gist of the story—not the wording and not the details. The gist of a story
is an archetypal example of what a Gestalt is. It coheres together in memory as
a single unit. It may be unspooled when retelling it, but while doing that you
are keeping the gist in sight, for it’s the source of what you’re reciting.
The value of a gist for retaining things in memory has been known for a
long time. In the 1960s cognitive psychologists used the word chunking to
describe a process of binding together different items to form a meaningful
whole which is easily remembered. The reason this is possible is that once a
Gestalt is formed, it hangs together tightly as a single unit of thought. It is
stored as a single unit, and emerges into consciousness as a single unit. Yet a
Gestalt, like a panoramic landscape, may be very rich in content.
Human memory is a remarkable process which is not fully understood.
Possibly, what our brain commits to memory is not an exact portrayal of what
we wish to recall, but rather the steps through which it was encoded. To retrieve
the memory, we go through the encoding process in reverse. This is very likely