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Gestalt Psychology
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Using the perceptual-conceptual bridges of Gestalt Psychology, cross fertilisation between artistic disciplines could accelerate greatly. This could be particularly so between the arts of time and space. Architects will find new ways of drawing on Musical form to create structures that are in some ways isomorphic to Musical compositions. Perhaps much like Music, Architecture will abandon paper as a design medium and move entirely into the digital domain.
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An important but overlooked influence in education and psychology is Gestalt psychology, which originated as a response to behaviorism. Gestalt psychology, which is related in some ways to the philosophy now known as constructivism, held the belief that people do not perceive the world as it is, rather they interpret what they see in terms of their own filters (that is, they impose order and meaning on what they perceive). Meanings (significations) are different, according to each person's individual cultural and personal experiences. While the visual system is often compared to a camera, the analogy is inaccurate because a brain does more than look at pictures. It interprets them, tries to make sense of them, and considers cause and effect. Three important figures in the Gestalt school were:
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Gestalt psychology originated from a reaction against the rigorous atomistic method of scientific analysis (Helson, 1987). Gestalt argues that the atomistic approach to science analyzes objects, meanings, values and dynamic processes into meaningless units which have nothing to do with the patterns in which they originally appeared (Helson, 1987). Subsequently, the atomistic method of analysis makes it impossible to describe or derive real wholes from a knowledge of parts. "Since the whole possesses its own specific properties, one can never tell in advance from a knowledge of the parts what the whole will be or how it will behave" (Helson, 1987 p.543).
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In 1910 a psychologist, Max Wertheimer by name, was traveling by train from Vienna to the Rhineland on his vacation.' During this journey an idea came to him for a research study which was to found Gestalt psychology. Gone were his plans for a vacation. At Frankfurt, the next major stop, he left the train, bought a toy stroboscope, and took it to his hotel room to verify, in a preliminary way, the "insight" that had just come to him. The stroboscope, it should be explained, is a device allowing successive still pictures to be exposed at a constant rate of speed so that movement is perceived. Before the advent of motion pictures, which itself is a later development of the same principle, stroboscopes were relatively common as children's toys. However, Wertheimer did not have to use the stroboscope in his formal experiment; the University of Frankfurt placed at his disposal a tachistoscope.
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Gestalt psychology is the school that puts emphasis on humans perceiving objects and patterns as whole units instead of disconnected collections of impressions. The idea of parts being seen as more than a sum of their parts was radical from the perspective of more traditional Structuralist and Functionalist psychology.
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Gestalt grouping is not the only technique offered by Gestalt Psychology in order to create low-level associations between phenemena sensed by different sensory modalities. A visible structure and an audible structure that share the same structure of operations and relations are said to be "isomorphic". In Gestalt psychology, a one-to-one correspondence between elemental attributes is not essential for relationships to be discerned; structural similarity is another powerful form or relationship. Such isomorphism may be regarded as a means by which to fold dimensional material within spatio-temporal Gesamtkunstwerke. This permits works to take forms other than the tubular representation of space-time permitted by an approach based on physical sciences.
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Gestalt Psychology