Figure-ground is another Gestalt psychology principle. It was first introduced by the Danish phenomenolo-
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Basically, we seem to have an innate tendency to pereive one aspect of an event as the figure or fore-ground and the other as the ground or back-ground. There is only one image here, and yet, by changing nothing but our attitude, we can see two different things. It doesn't even seem to be possible to see them both at the same time.
But the gestalt principles are by no means restricted to perception — that's just where they were first noticed. Take, for example, memory. That too seems to work by these laws. If you see an irregular saw-tooth figure, it is likely that your memory will straighten it out for you a bit. Or, if you experience something that doesn't quite make sense to you, you will tend to remember it as having meaning that may not have been there. A good example is dreams: Watch yourself the next time you tell someone a dream and see if you don't notice yourself modifying the dream a little to force it to make sense.
Learning was something the Gestalt psychologists were particularly interested in. One thing they noticed right away is that we often learn, not the literal things in front of us, but the relations between them. For example, chickens can be made to peck at the lighter of two gray swatches. When they are then presented with another two swatches, one of which is the lighter of the two preceding swatches, and the other a swatch that is even lighter, they will peck not at the one they pecked at before, but at the lighter one. Even something as stupid as a chicken «understands* the idea of relative lightness and darkness.
Gestalt theory is well known for its concept of insight learning. People tend to misunderstand what is being suggested here: They are not so much talking about flashes of intuition, but rather solving a problem by means of the recognition of a gestalt or organizing principle.
The most famous example of insight learning involved a chimp named Sultan. He was presented with many different practical problems (most involving getting a hard-to-reach banana). When, for example, he had been allowed to play with sticks that could be put together like a fishing pole, he appeared to consider in a very human fashion the situation of the out-of-reach banana thoughtfully — and then rather suddenly jump up, assemble the poles, and reach the banana.
A similar example involved a five year old girl, presented with a geometry problem way over her head: How do you figure the area of a parallelogram? She considered, then excitedly asked for a pair of scizzors. She cut off a triangle from one end, and moved it around to the other side, turning the parallelogram into a simple rectangle. Wertheimer called this productive thinking.
The idea behind both of these examples, and much of the gestalt explanation of things, is that the world of our experiencing is meaningfully organized, to one degree or another. When we learn or solve problems, we are essentially recognizing meaning that is there, in the experience, for the «dis-covering».
Most of what we've just looked at has been absorbed into «mainstream* psychology — to such a degree that many people forget to givd credit to the people who discovered these principles. There is one more part of their theory that has had less acceptance: Isomorphism.
Isomorphism suggests that there is some clear similarity in the gestalt patterning of stimuli and of the activity in the brain while we are perceiving the stimuli. There is а «тар» of the experience with the same structural order as the experience itself, albeit « constructed* of very different materials. We are still waiting to see what an experience «looks* like in an experiencing brain. It may take a while.
Kurt Lewin
Gestalt Psychology, even though it no longer survives as a separate entity, has had an enormous impact. Two people in particular lead the way in introducing it into other aspects of psychology: Kurt Goldstein and Kurt Lewin.
Kurt Lewin was born September 9, 1890, in Mogilno, Germany. He received his PhD from the University of Berlin under Stumpf. After military service, he returned to Berlin where he worked with Wertheimer, Koffka, and Kohler.
He went to the U.S. as a guest lecturer at Stanford and Cornell, and took a position at the University of Iowa in 1935. In 1944, he created and directed the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT. He died in 1947, just beginning his work there.
Lewin created a topological theory that expressed
human dynamics in the form of a map representing a
person's life space. The map is patterned with one's
needs, desires, and goal, and vectors or arrows indicated
the directions and strengths of these forces — all oper-
ating as a Gestalt. ? f.f-H
This theory inspired any number of psychologists in the U.S., most particularly those in social psychology. Among the people he influenced were Muzafer Sherif, Solomon Asch, and Leon Festinger.
Kurt Goldstein
The other person was Kurt Goldstein. Born in 1878, he received his MD from the University of Breslau in 1903. He went to teach at the Neurological Institute of the University of Frankfurt, where he met the founders of Gestalt psychology.
He went to Berlin to be a professor there, and then went on to New York City in 1935. There, he wrote The Organism in 1939, and later Human Nature in the Light of Pathology in 1963. He died in 1965.
Golstein developed a holistic view of brain function, bused on research that showed that people with brain damage learned to use other parts of their brains in com-ptnsation. He extended his holism to the entire organ-iт. and postulated that there was only one drive in hu-man functioning, and coined the term self-actualization. I Itlf preservation, the usual postulated central motive, Кб aid. is actually pathological.