To live in peace, you need to finish everything to the end. Why is this happening

The world as a controlled hallucination, “aha effect” and what design has to do with it: what cognitive science and psychology know about gestalt

The whole is more incredible than the parts

You have a picture in front of you. If you don’t have neurological or screen problems, then you see a bike. It is the bicycle as a whole object, and not its separate parts. Psychologists say that the brain tends to form a holistic picture – gestalt.

At the beginning of the XNUMXth century, a group of experimental psychologists – Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka – studied the features of human perception. They were interested in how we manage to adequately perceive this seemingly chaotic, stimulating and unpredictable world. The result of their work was a new direction – Gestalt psychology.

“Gestalt” literally translates from German as “form” or “figure”. In Russian it sounds more like “integrity”. We perceive, say, a melody precisely as a melody, and not as a set of individual sounds. This principle—it is called holism—is central to Gestalt psychology. As Kurt Koffka wrote, the whole created by our perception is fundamentally different than the sum of its parts. Not just more, but qualitatively different.

From the whole mass of signals, our perception singles out a certain image, and the rest becomes its background. Surely you have come across the “Rubin Vase” – a classic example of circulating figures.

The Rubin vase is a classic depiction of revolving figures used in Gestalt psychology.

In it you can see either a vase or two profiles, but not both at the same time. The figure and the background enter into relations with each other and give rise to a new property.

“Figure and ground” is not the only principle of human perception that Gestalt psychologists have described.

Gestalt principles

• Similarity: objects of the same size, color, shape, shape are perceived together.
• Proximity: we group objects that are close to each other.
• Closure: we try to complete the drawing so that it takes on its full shape
• Adjacency: it is enough for objects to be close in time or space for us to perceive them as a whole image.

Gestalt principles work well, for example, in design. When a web page or ^application no matter laid out – matched wrong fonts, objects are not aligned or grouped incorrectly – you will have _sensationthat something is wrong here, even if you don’t professional designer. For example, as in This paragraph.

How to close the gestalt?

The perception of not only triangles or buttons on the screen, but also life situations can be holistic. Complex behavioral reactions also work according to the laws of gestalt. Gestalt therapy is built on this, which is important not to be confused with Gestalt psychology. Most often, Gestalt is spoken of in the context of whether it is closed or not closed. So, here we are talking about the therapeutic approach.

The founder of Gestalt therapy, Frederick Perls, expanded the ideas of Gestalt psychologists from cognitive processes to worldview. Our whole psyche is holistic – it self-regulates and strives for integrity.

At every single moment, some of our need comes to the fore and becomes a figure in the background.

Then it is replaced by another need, and so on throughout life.

This mechanic works at all levels simultaneously – from natural needs to global plans for life. Hunger, thirst or going to the toilet cannot be put off for a long time, and the need will have to be satisfied. With an unread book, an overlooked series or an unfinished business, the process can drag on, and, for example, with unrequited love or a conflict with parents, it will never end at all.

Unsatisfied needs create a kind of tension and pull over the body’s resources, in particular memory. Therefore, we remember about unfinished situations much better. This feature of our perception is called “Zeigarnik effect”. Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed that waiters perfectly remember current orders and quickly forget already paid ones. Subsequently, she experimentally showed that people not only remember incomplete actions better, but also strive to reproduce them.

“Empty Chair” is one of the main techniques in Gestalt therapy. Described by Frederick Perls

There are unfinished situations that last too long, years and decades. Sometimes situations cannot be completed in reality, such as a conflict with a long-dead parent. Such unclosed gestalts have a destructive effect on the psyche and can lead to serious problems. In such cases, Gestalt therapists are needed.

Gestalt therapy is situational therapy. The approach itself is largely focused on the feelings and emotions of a person, on their bodily manifestations. The Gestalt therapist helps to understand what need a person seeks to satisfy, how it manifests itself on different “levels” of the psyche, and to come up with an end to it – to close the gestalt.

Where do gestalts come from?

Let’s go back to Gestalt psychology. It appeared in 1912, in an era when the methods of modern neuroscience did not exist. Therefore, to understand what exactly is a gestalt and what is its nature, it was possible only conceptually. Nevertheless, Gestalt theory dominated the study of perception throughout the first half of the XNUMXth century.

Since the late 1950s, neurophysiologists David Hubel and Thorsten Wiesel began to record individual neurons in the visual cortex of cats and monkeys. It turned out that each neuron responds strictly to some property of the image: the angle of rotation and orientation, the direction of movement. They are called “feature detectors”: line detectors, edge detectors. The work was extremely successful, and Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the Nobel Prize for them. Later, already in experiments on humans, neurons were discovered that respond to more complex stimuli – detectors of faces and even specific faces (the famous “Jennifer Aniston neuron”).

So the idea of ​​Gestalt was replaced by a hierarchical approach. Any object is a set of features, each of which is responsible for its own group of neurons. In this sense, the whole image that the Gestaltists talked about is simply the activation of higher-order neurons.

But not everything was so simple. More recent experiments have shown that we often grasp the whole picture much earlier than individual elements. If you are shown the initial picture of a bicycle for a fraction of a second, then you will confidently report that you saw a bicycle, but you are unlikely to say whether it had pedals. The conclusions spoke about the presence of a gestalt effect. This went against the idea of ​​a cascade of neurons recognizing signs from the simplest to the most complex.

As an answer, the theory of the reverse hierarchy arose – when we look at something, the neurons responsible for the big picture react the fastest, and those that recognize the details are pulled up behind them. This approach was closer to the Gestalt concept, but still left questions. Theoretically, there are infinitely many options for what may appear before our eyes. At the same time, the brain seems to know in advance which neurons to activate.

This “in advance” is the key to understanding Gestalts. We are talking about one of the most breakthrough ideas in understanding the work of the brain at the turn of the XNUMXth and XNUMXst centuries – predictive coding. The brain does not just perceive and process information from the outside. On the contrary, he predicts what is happening “outside” and then compares the prediction with reality. Prediction is when higher level neurons send signals to lower level neurons. Those, in turn, receive signals from the outside, from the senses, and send them “upstairs”, reporting how much the predictions diverge from reality.

Gestalt is an event, not something static. Imagine that the “upper” neurons meet with the “lower” neurons and agree on what the reality is in a given place at a given time. Having agreed, they shake hands with each other. This handshake is a few hundred milliseconds long and will be a gestalt.

The brain will not necessarily change predictions. He may also ignore reality. Remember Gestalt therapy and needs: they can exist at the most primitive level. In the distant past, recognizing an object meant seeing a predator in time and not being eaten, or finding something edible and not dying of hunger. In both cases, the goal is to adapt to reality, not to describe it with great precision.

The predictive model is a breakthrough model for Gestalt psychology

If the predictive model works, the organism receives positive reinforcement. Hence, there are two possible situations where the gestalt effect can occur:

• The prediction is corrected – we suddenly have a whole image, there is an “aha-effect”. This is reinforced by the release of dopamine. When you recognize a familiar face in the crowd or finally understand what you could not understand for a long time – this is the very “aha” effect. On it is built an art that constantly violates our expectations.
• Prediction stays the same – we, as it were, automatically see imaginary objects, the same triangle. There is also logic in this – the brain does not spend extra energy to correct the model of the world. This has been shown in experiments. Gestalt effects coincided with a decrease in activity in the corresponding areas of the visual cortex.

Images that show the gestalt effect, like many other optical illusions, use these mechanics. They kind of hack our perception system. The “Rubin Vase” or “Necker Cube” force the brain to constantly correct predictions and provoke a series of “aha-effects”. Imaginary triangles, volumes, perspectives, on the contrary, are so deeply rooted in perception and have worked so well in the past that the brain prefers to rely on them rather than reality.

Drawings showing the gestalt effect

The idea of ​​Gestalt opens a window into the structure of our perception. Recent advances in brain research suggest that the world for each of us is a kind of controlled hallucination. It is not so important whether our internal “map of the area” is consistent with the territory of reality, if it allows us to satisfy all needs. If it does not allow, the brain makes the necessary adjustments.

Gestalt therapy also speaks of an integral perception of reality and the boundary of contact with the world. But unlike Gestalt psychology, it is not about the perception of triangles or even faces, but about more complex phenomena – behavior, needs and problems with their satisfaction. Thanks to recent advances in brain research and sophisticated computational models, we have a better understanding of the nature of gestalts. There is a chance that in the foreseeable future this will help people solve problems that are really important to them and close old gestalts.

What you need to know about Gestalts

• Gestalt is a holistic image created by our perception. An image, a person’s face, a melody or an abstract idea, we perceive immediately and entirely.
• Gestalt psychology at the beginning of the XNUMXth century described many features of our perception. For example, how do we group objects that are similar to each other or are just close together. Today, these rules are actively applied in design and art.
• In the XNUMXst century, the idea of ​​gestalt is once again attracting interest, this time in the context of brain research. Gestalt in a broad sense shows how the brain creates a model of the world. Through neural feedback circuits, the brain constantly compares predictions with reality. Renewal of the model of reality gives birth to gestalt. Thanks to this, we perceive the world as one and whole, and not as a chaotic set of incentives.
• Gestalt therapy is also about a holistic perception of the world and contact with the environment. Only here we are not talking about neural circuits, but about the psyche, behavior and needs. The human psyche strives for integrity, balance, but for this it constantly needs to satisfy needs and come into contact with the environment. When a need (anything from going to the toilet to implementing a multi-year plan) is satisfied, the gestalt is said to be closed.