That school of thought was created by psychologists interested in perception, especially visual perception. Its most basic principles are two:
1. A form, structure or Gestalt is defined, perceived and remembered by the pattern of relations between its elements or parts, and not reducible to them.
2. The whole is other than the sum of the parts, and not reducible to them.
These principles are not just useful but indispensable to understand, among other things, perceptual constancy (a rose is a rose, is a rose, despite differences in size, fragrance, color, etc..). They are indispensable to understand the essentials of language and every other cognitive function.
They are also indispensable to understand the structure and dynamics of neural networks, in the brain or out of it. The reason they are indispensable is because the cognitive code is essentially a relational code at all levels of analysis.
Essentially the concepts of Gestalt are--or should be--given preeminence in the neuroscience of attention, perception, memory, language and intelligence. The connectome--if we ever get it!--will make no sense to anyone without the Gestalt principles.
My explanation for the prevailing neglect is simply that Gestalt is essentially antithetical to reductionism, the "golden rule" of natural science. This makes it difficult to handle by the computational neuroscientist.
Yet people should learn, the sooner the better, that there is a methodological "floor" to cognition and to cognitive neuroscience. Reductionism under that "floor" is pointless and self-defeating. A percept, a memory, a word, a sentence, a cortical neural network,...disintegrate, their meaning and function lost, if we attempt to pierce that floor with our obstinate reductionism.
Cheers, Joaquín
Very interesting question, Joaquin.
In my view, part of the answer to explain this neglect has to do with the principles you pose in your questions. Latent in those principles of Gestalt psychology there are two phenomena that make it challenging to some to apprehend: Complexity (in #1) and Emergence (in #2).
I feel optimistic though. It seems that as our knowledge increases we are increasingly able to move back and forth from reductionistic explanations to complexity ones.
Best regards, Fidel
Right on, Fidel! It is the challenge of understanding how the brain handles both complexity and emergence in cognition. Not only that: both complexity and emergence are partly generated in the brain, actively, from prior experience; not the other way around, as structuralist psychologists would have it. Cheers
Dear Joaquin,
Your question, to me, couldn't be more pertinent, as it's been occupying my own thoughts for some while. They coincide exactly with the points you raise, which in my conceptualizations of the brain's workings are axiomatic. In fact, the lack of interest in Gestalt theory puzzles me enough to question whether my theorizing is missing the mark in fundamental respects. To be aware that I'm not puzzling over this alone and in such revered company is thoroughly reassuring!
I'm no scholar of Gestalt theory, incidentally, But here is the gist of my own identification with its two foundation principles and your commentary to them:
Our ability to discern form - what emerges from the complex of relationships between simultaneously or consecutively processed phenomena - would be impossible without the brain's capacity to differentiate and define the boundaries of phenomena, which presupposes its capacity to detect contrasting qualities in sensory input, at the fundamental level of stimulus transduction. All else - our conscious perceiving and cognitive identifying of phenomena, our ability to couple appropriately configured actions in response (automatically, or with reference to immediate feedback, or as chunked sequences purposively assembled in working memory) - ensues through progressively composite syntheses of that input's differentiated qualities, modulated by currently active top-down states of intentionality, affect and context-related expectation, and kept in check by executive functions mediating attention and inhibitory control..
Also of basic importance, the process of transduction and qualitative differentiation continues over time while stimulus qualities change, and the moment each detected change occurs, the onset of a different temporal event is necessarily defined, thus specifying each phenomenon's duration, before any synthetic stages of input processing have been embarked upon. Temporal encoding of visual input makes motion-detection possible, while successive isochronous changes in auditory input are interpreted as a predictable pace or as rhythmic groupings, which can be directly utilized for co-ordinating and timing imminent motor actions singly.or as chunked sequences.
As you can see, in the foregoing I'm referring just to here-and-now perceiving and acting. I think it goes without saying that our ability to form long-term representations of anything follows from that, and would be impossible otherwise. The implications of that will, I know, be thoroughly obvious to you, and ought surely to be for any cognitive psychologist or neuroscientist.
My very best regards,
Richard.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Computer Science and Engineering
- Coding