Illusion - Is Seeing Really Believing?/Illusion - Is Seeing Really Believing (1998)(Marshall Media)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/illusion/rock_txt.cxt/00036_Text_ref02t.txt

Text File | 1997-02-04 | 2KB | 53 lines

    The principal heirs of this
tradition of thought were the
Gestalt psychologists of the early
decades of this century. The
central Gestalt concept was that
of perceptual organization.
Whereas sensations are logically
separate and unrelated, our
perceptions are of whole units
or things. It is difficult to
maintain that we begin life with
a chaotic amalgamation or sum
of sensations and somehow
learn to organize them into
distinct and segregated units
such as objects with specific
shapes separated from a
background. It is far more
plausible to believe that the
perceptual world is organized to
begin with on the basis of
innately given laws that govern
unit formation and the
emergence of a figure on a
background.

    The whole units we
perceiveΓÇöΓÇôfor example, a melody
or an object formΓÇöΓÇôare not only
the result of a process of
organization that unifies some
elements of the world rather
than others. The elements of
these units are related to one
another in such a way as to
create a configuration that has
properties that do not reside in
the parts at all. A melody, for
instance, is not simply a sum of
separate tones; it is a quality
based on the interrelation of
all the tones. Thus the famous
Gestalt dictum: The whole is
qualitatively different from the
sum of its parts. That is why one
can alter all the tones by
transposing the melody in
octave or key and still preserve
the melody. The melody remains
the same because the tonal
relations and rhythms remain
the same.