PART VII
THE GESTALT FRAME
What is the Gestalt Frame?
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “gestalt” is a word of German origination meaning a physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts. The word was defined and used within the context of the investigations in phenomenology that began in the late 19th century, concerning the formation of a World-View (social psychology) that typical members of a society or culture acquired and applied to themselves, their responses to others, and their interactions with the environment. The insight which the term gestalt implied was that this social psychology was not experienced as an assemblage of parts, but as a unified whole. The Gestalt Frame of THE HUMAN KNOWLEDGE MINDMAP analytically deconstructs the unified whole of the World-View into four aspects, so that its facets can be more clearly identified and described. The Frame is the filter through which all sense-data pass on their way “into the mind” or outward as directed actions.
How does the Gestalt Frame form?
Ever since the research of Edmund Husserl in the late 19th century, this is the question that has guided work in phenomenology. Edward de Bono did his graduate research at Oxford University on this topic, from which emerged his book MECHANISM OF MIND. In the archetypal sense, there are two approaches to the forming of the Gestalt Frame. Hussurl and his followers took a “learning” or “conditioning” approach – which basically contends that people acquire their World-View from their social environment as young children. Under this model, it is taught tacitly rather than explicitly, and its structure and operation are usually sub-conscious except in very particular circumstances (if an experience is counter-intuitive, that may prompt recognition of “the limits of one’s thinking”). The other approach, represented by de Bono’s work, and much in favor these days, sees the World-View emerging as a result of the brain’s own “natural way” of processing incoming sense-data. The term that advocates of this approach prefer is that the human nervous system is a “self-organizing system” that functions to enable the person to align their behaviour to the environment so as to be able to cope. It may not surprise readers to learn that I think the evidence supports a complementarity of both processes.
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