The whole and the sum of its parts
C
ast your memory back to the first time you found yourself fooled by an optical illusion. Perhaps it was a contrived example: the young girl changing to a crone and back again; faces that became a vase and vice versa; a staircase that kept reversing its angle; or the arrowed lines that appeared shorter and longer, but weren’t. Maybe you were in a stationary train that appeared to travel past the one on the adjacent line, or gazing at a neon sign and seeing movement in the flashing lights. In any event, when you pinched yourself, nothing had changed. You went on with your hallucination – but in the comfort that everyone else was similarly crazy.
There’s an implicit acceptance that the world is an ill-defined place, full of shades and missing pieces. And it is, at least as we experience it, so why in the act of perception does it take on a certainty that belies this ambiguity?
We grow used to being deceived by our senses, and can laugh at ourselves indulgently when nature (or a magician) plays tricks on us. There’s an implicit acceptance that the world is an ill-defined place, full of shades and missing pieces. And it is, at least as we experience it, so why in the act of perception does it take on a certainty that belies this ambiguity? Why, when we know we are being hoodwinked, does our false perception seem so real, if only for a moment.
That the subjective and the objective are not necessarily as one is hardly a new observation. The true nature of the world presents a puzzle that has long mystified philosophers and scientists. But we’re concerned here with something a little more down to earth. Somewhere between our senses registering a stimulus and our brain interpreting it the scene is being rejigged, its imperfections airbrushed out or gaps filled in. And all the while the makeover is occurring without our conscious awareness.
Why does this happen?
One explanation sees it in terms of the brain protecting itself from information overload. It’s grown used to the uncertainties in sensation and imposes its own order or assumptions on perception, so as to leave space for more interesting activities. A more intriguing explanation was provided by the German psychologist Max Wertheimer founder of the Gestalt school of psychology, early last century. Using illusions of motion as his starting point Wertheimer took aim at the then traditional model of perception, in which an entity was seen as simply the sum of its parts, arguing it was inadequate to account for such illusions. The explanation, Wertheimer argued, lay not in properties of the isolated parts but in the condition of the whole. When stationary objects seem to take on continuous movement, what appears to be a case of different elements at different moments in different locations (and hence the apparent movement), is really just the one entity. What we're experiencing is the effect of a gestalt (loosely translated as “configuration”), in which the whole has properties that go beyond the mere sum of its integral parts.
... intuition wants us to believe that a phenomenon with such capacity to take us out of ourselves, to move us to joy or to despair, has to be more than just the sum of its parts.
Take the example of a piece of music. Superficially it might appear that the melody we are enjoying is simply a collection of constituent notes. But intuition wants us to believe that a phenomenon with such capacity to take us out of ourselves, to move us to joy or to despair, has to be more than just the sum of its parts. And so Wertheimer and the gestalt psychologists argued. The conventional view, they insisted, would place control with the notes, whereas in fact it lies within the whole – the melody. If you doubt this, try changing the key. The parts would now be different, yet the melody remains the same. Clearly a piece of music is something different from the sum of its parts. But in a real sense it’s also greater as well.
... it touches aspects of our lives in ways that have implications for how we view the world, and make decisions about it.
The distinction between something being ‘greater than’ or just ‘different from’ the sum of its parts is not one that has stirred passions. Even when the gestalt movement was still a prominent force in psychology, the issue was seen as more a case of semantic confusion, a popular misconception by those who hadn’t read the primary sources, rather than a conceptual distinction of any significance. Now, at a time when gestalt views have largely been confined to the dustbin of psychological history (at least on the surface), the greater versus different distinction could seem even more of a non issue. Except that it touches aspects of our lives in ways that have implications for how we view the world, and make decisions about it. (A brief sidestep is required here. With certain phenomena neither ‘equal to’ nor ‘greater than will apply – the whole will in fact be less than the sum of its parts. This arises from a property of matter called “binding energy”. It is tempting to leave this exception to the physicists. However the prospect of something being less than the sum of its parts is too intriguing to ignore, and as we will see, provides a salutary warning of what can happen in life situations.)
More so than in most sciences, fashions in psychology are fickle. The last hundred years has seen the rise and demise of many schools of thought involving grand ideas that were dominant in their time, of which gestalt theory is just one. After establishing gestalt laws within perception (the overriding one being the law of pragnanz, which posits an innate drive towards simplicity and symmetry) Wertheimer and his followers pushed the application of gestalt principles into areas such as memory (consider how smoothed out our memories appear compared to the original events), learning (the recognition of organizing principles) and social psychology (leading to ground breaking developments in interpersonal perception and group dynamics, including Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance).
But though committed to experimentation, the gestalt movement's structural dynamic theories were seen as tinged with the
metaphysical – this at a time when the fledgling science of psychology was
distancing itself from anything that smacked of the immaterial.
Predictably, the
baby was thrown out with the bath water. Ideas that
warranted a more patient reception were dismissed – first as being too
aligned with introspection and later as lacking the requisite physiological
evidence. (It’s ironic that subsequent findings emerging from psycho-physiology
now appear to offer much of that missing support.)
It’s a football team, and it comprises a mixture of parts: combinations of brawn, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, courage, experience, intelligence, knowledge… It’s also a gestalt.
A shift to the present era. It’s the day of the big match. The coach is giving the last minute locker room oration. (If you like, it’s Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday with Al Pacino doing the pep talking.) Listening is a group of players – individuals with different skills and widely varied personalities. It’s a football team, and it comprises a mixture of parts: combinations of brawn, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, courage, experience, intelligence, knowledge… It’s also a gestalt.
In the film
Pacino’s team has been sadly underperforming. As they face the biggest test of
their season he pitches the need to play this game “inch by inch”, as a team. The motivational arguments
are powerfully drawn, logical and emotional. The Pacino character understands
that team motivation is all about relationships
– relationships of players to one another, relationships with the coaching
staff, and most important relationships with themselves, in the form of
self-respect. This is the metaphysical nucleus that turns a collection of
players into a team. He needs his team this day to be greater than, not just
different from the sum of its parts. And so it proves. The point though is not the
predictability of
The potential for dynamism exists in the most everyday situations. A talented chef can take an unlikely combination of ingredients and turn out a whole that far exceeds in taste and appearance what would be expected of its parts. Conversely a chef of inferior talent, or perhaps one with less passion, could take the choicest ingredients, intrinsically valuable in their own right, and turn them into something forgettable. The resultant dishes might stir some diners to excitement or profound regret, while others may view them as neither inspirational nor disappointing, because of factors intervening that evening that impinge upon their own gestalt and override all else.
... our lives are full of happenings and entities which have at their core a dynamic element. Gestalts whose characters work an influence on their individual parts to produce outcomes that can astound or dismay.
Families, small work groups, a circle of friends, the experience of a rock concert ... the simple enjoyment of a meal – our lives are full of relationships and events which have at their core a dynamic element. Gestalts whose characters work an influence on their individual parts to produce outcomes that can astound or dismay.
Wertheimer spent much of his meritorious life frustrated at the failure of psychology and science in general to understand or accept the breadth of the gestalt concept. Far from being restricted to a few phenomena, in his mind the quality of a gestalt characterized most of life’s events and the real exceptions were only those that were inert and purposeless (a pile of rocks). For him the whole was fundamentally different, so much richer and more complex than its assemblage of parts that notions of equal to or greater than or even attempts to measure differences, produced only distortions of reality – and in any event missed the point.
How we evaluate the odds depends on our point of view. The adage “look before you leap” and the famous dictum of Wolfgang Goethe that “boldness has genius, power, and magic in it”, provide us the choices.
For us though there is much to be gained, or regained, in these distinctions: the recognition that however unremarkable a situation may appear, it (along with most phenomena) is rife with opportunity … and of course, risk. How we evaluate the odds depends on our point of view. The adage “look before you leap” and the famous dictum of Wolfgang Goethe that “boldness has genius, power, and magic in it”, provide us the choices.
In an address
to the Kant Society in
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Sources
R I. Watson, The Great Psychologists, Lippincott, New York, 1978
Chris Frith, Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2007
Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth Century Philosophers, Stuart Brown, Diane Collinson and Robert Wilkinson (Eds.), Routledge, London, 2002
S. J. Read et. al., "Connectionism, Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Processes, and Gestalt Principles: (Re) Introducing Cognitive Dynamics to Social Psychology", Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1, 1, 1997
C. George Boeree, "Gestalt Psychology", 2000, at webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/gestalt
Max Wertheimer, Gestalt Theory, Parts 1 and 2, 1924, Gestalt Archive: Max Wertheimer
Any Given Sunday
D. Brett King, "The legacy of Max Werheimer and gestalt psychology - Sixtieth Anniversary, 1934-1994: The Legacy of Our Past", LookSmart, Winter, 1994
“Connectionism” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1997, at www.plato.stanford.edu
