Gestalt Postcard

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism (from German: Gestalt [ɡəˈʃtalt] "shape, form") is a philosophy of mind of the Berlin School of experimental psychology. Gestalt psychology is an attempt to understand the laws behind the ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world. The central principle of gestalt psychology is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organising tendencies through the law of prägnanz. This principle maintains that when the human mind (perceptual system) forms a percept or "gestalt", the whole has a reality of its own, independant of the parts. The original famous phrase of Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, "the whole is something else than the sum of its parts" is often incorrectly translated as "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts", and thus used when explaining gestalt theory, and further incorrectly applied to systems theory. Koffka did not like the translation. "No, what we mean is that the whole is different from the sum of his parts," he said. The whole has an independant existence. In the study of perception, Gestalt psychologists claim that perceptions are the products of complex interactions among various stimuli. Contrary to the behaviorist approach to focusing on stimulus and response, Gestalt psychologists sought to understand the organisation of cognitive processes (Carlson and Heth, 2010). Our brain is capable of generating whole forms, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of global figures instead of just collections of simpler and unrelated elements (points, lines, curves, etc.).