Growing the Tree of Knowledge
41
entire symphony appeared to him in mind, experienced simultaneously. I have
discussed this episode with my musician friends, and they tell me that when
they learn a piece to be performed, it dwells in their mind as a single entirety.
Likewise, it is as a single whole unit that a story is remembered, and that a
scientific theory has meaning in the mind of a knower.
Creative thinking is a remarkable process of which very little is known. In
essence, it is the artful management of Gestalt thoughts, and demands skilled
and disciplined practice. A Gestalt thought is a hierarchical structure in mind,
and to “know” it requires that the whole thought be present in awareness
simultaneously. Clearly, such a thought cannot be too large or detailed if all
of it is to be in the window of awareness at one time. Consequently, we have
developed ways of subdividing Gestalts into related parts, keeping track of the
separate parts, and nimbly skipping back and forth between them.
There are tight limits on the size, or span, that a Gestalt can have in order
to be knowable in mind. Skillful knowing is the art of managing our thoughts
in such a way that a complicated scheme or idea is divided between multiple
individual Gestalts. These separate Gestalts are then linked by something like
a mental flowchart which displays how they connect with one another. This
allows the thinker to transfer seamlessly from one to another in the process of
thinking.
Human thinking is limited by our biology. There are anatomical limits
on memory and on the span of human awareness. In order to go beyond
those limits, we have developed the skill of identifying the joints along which
Gestalts can be naturally split into smaller Gestalt parts. In the course of
reasoning, we’re hardly aware of the fact that we are busily cutting and pasting
Gestalts, while in the background we keep track of the connections between
the subordinate parts. However, Gestalt thoughts cannot be divided and joined
together indiscriminately: This process is subject to very stringent psychological
laws, whose basics are not understood at this time.
A well-known principle of Gestalt-formation is the memory-expansion technique known as chunking 10 . For generations it has been used by so-called
“memory champions” who have trained themselves to recollect long lists of
numbers or other items. The idea is that out of the roll of items to be recalled,
the performer creates a story or a picture in which all the items appear in a fixed
sequence. Such a narrative or image becomes a single Gestalt—something that
can be “seen” in one mental glance—and by holding the image in the mind’s
eye, the master is able to pick out the items of the list.
What this technique proves is that there are specific ways of gathering
thoughts together in such a way that they form an all-embracing unified Gestalt
which includes them all in one narrative or pictorial framework. Apparently
41
entire symphony appeared to him in mind, experienced simultaneously. I have
discussed this episode with my musician friends, and they tell me that when
they learn a piece to be performed, it dwells in their mind as a single entirety.
Likewise, it is as a single whole unit that a story is remembered, and that a
scientific theory has meaning in the mind of a knower.
Creative thinking is a remarkable process of which very little is known. In
essence, it is the artful management of Gestalt thoughts, and demands skilled
and disciplined practice. A Gestalt thought is a hierarchical structure in mind,
and to “know” it requires that the whole thought be present in awareness
simultaneously. Clearly, such a thought cannot be too large or detailed if all
of it is to be in the window of awareness at one time. Consequently, we have
developed ways of subdividing Gestalts into related parts, keeping track of the
separate parts, and nimbly skipping back and forth between them.
There are tight limits on the size, or span, that a Gestalt can have in order
to be knowable in mind. Skillful knowing is the art of managing our thoughts
in such a way that a complicated scheme or idea is divided between multiple
individual Gestalts. These separate Gestalts are then linked by something like
a mental flowchart which displays how they connect with one another. This
allows the thinker to transfer seamlessly from one to another in the process of
thinking.
Human thinking is limited by our biology. There are anatomical limits
on memory and on the span of human awareness. In order to go beyond
those limits, we have developed the skill of identifying the joints along which
Gestalts can be naturally split into smaller Gestalt parts. In the course of
reasoning, we’re hardly aware of the fact that we are busily cutting and pasting
Gestalts, while in the background we keep track of the connections between
the subordinate parts. However, Gestalt thoughts cannot be divided and joined
together indiscriminately: This process is subject to very stringent psychological
laws, whose basics are not understood at this time.
A well-known principle of Gestalt-formation is the memory-expansion technique known as chunking 10 . For generations it has been used by so-called
“memory champions” who have trained themselves to recollect long lists of
numbers or other items. The idea is that out of the roll of items to be recalled,
the performer creates a story or a picture in which all the items appear in a fixed
sequence. Such a narrative or image becomes a single Gestalt—something that
can be “seen” in one mental glance—and by holding the image in the mind’s
eye, the master is able to pick out the items of the list.
What this technique proves is that there are specific ways of gathering
thoughts together in such a way that they form an all-embracing unified Gestalt
which includes them all in one narrative or pictorial framework. Apparently