Gestalt Psychology
Courtney Yeager
December 14, 2015
Gestalt psychology is one of the many schools of thought within the psychology world, however Gestalt psychology focuses upon the human mind and behavior as a whole. Max Wertheimer was the originator of Gestalt psychology and was formed in part to a response of structuralism introduced by Wilhelm Wundt. There were also a number of individuals whom helped to shape and mold the idea of Gestalt psychology, such as Immanuel Kant, Ernst Mach, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Cherry, 2014).
The fundamental theory behind Gestalt psychology is that there are areas in which our behavior is not determined by an individual element, but various elements that include our intrinsic nature and to discover such wholes that exist within our behavior and mind. One example used to give an idea of how Gestalt psychology works is the presence of flashing lights that often appear to be moving. Even though the lights are not physically moving our brains try to fill in the missing information that equates to us seeing the lights as moving. The belief is that the sum of the individual parts makes up the whole, leading to the discovery of various phenomena that occur during our personal perceptions (Cherry, 2014).
Optical illusions are a part of the experience that explains the gestalt psychology and how we view experiences within the world around us. Kant also helped to determine that our sensory perception is not the only conductor of learning, but insisted that instead the mind has a ‘mind’ of its own (Eberhardt, 2008). Kant believed that these abstractions of our thoughts are neither a part of our sensory production or perception but instead that our sensory perception is a continuous part of our connection within our environment surrounding us and our conscious experiences within such. Gestalt psychology gives us the gateway that we are presented to...