How Do We Make Sense of The World? Gestalt & The Association Process

Our senses, especially sight and hearing, gather vital information about the world around us. But in order to make that information useful our minds need to make sense of it. This mental process of organizing and receiving the information from our senses is knowing as The Perception Process!

There is a huge amount of information in what we see and hear. Our minds examine this incoming information and try to make sense of it and figure out what is important by looking for patterns. For example, when we see a square, our minds don’t just see a collection of four lines, but recognize that particular arrangement of lines as a square.

Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer, were the first to notice how our minds try to see if things have a recognizable form, or “essence”—what they called, in German, a Gestalt.

Gestalt psychologists, believed that our ability to interpret the information from our senses and recognize patterns is “hardwired” into our brains. A lot of arguments about how our brains organize information in regular ways, looking for particular kinds of patterns. Our perception—the way we interpret sensory information— seems to follow certain rules, which make up the Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization. The fact that separate objects can be put together in a certain way to form something different is a key idea in Gestalt psychology and the Association process into our brains, and it shows that our perception of an overall pattern is different from our perception of its separate parts.

This ability to organize incoming information and find patterns helps us distinguish between one thing and another. If we see something and recognize it as a cow in a field, for instance, we are making a distinction between the figure of the cow and the background. Even when we look at a two-dimension picture of a cow in a field, we still recognize the difference between figure and background, and use the way the images overlap to determine which objects are near to us and which are farther away. In addition, our minds recognize the patterns of perspective in the picture, and form an idea of the three-dimensional scene it represents—the smaller an object is, the farther away it is.

Perspective also helps us identify which direction things are moving in. If something is getting bigger on TV, our minds recognize that it is coming toward us, if it is getting smaller, we assume it’s moving away. We interpret the real, three-dimension world in the same way, using the clues of figure, background, and perspective to determine the relative positions of objects—which is vital for our ability to do practical things.

The Most Important Factor...

The Most Important Factor....

Here's a question for you. If you wanted to create a successful organization. Whether a business, school or non-profit organization. What would the most advantage or asset you could have?

Would it be the best product, most completive price, a brilliant sales team, a powerful brand, infrastructure and processes?

Let's say you believe that brand is the most influential factor. And of course the brand is an incredibly valuable component of a business, but where does it come from in the first place?

It comes from PEOPLE. People are the driving force of an organization, they are the most important ingredient for success.

Carnegie Said "Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floor... Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory."

Unfortunately there is a typically large working today and still believe that the factory, infrastructure, the process, the manual...are the king factors for success in business.

Again... think about it.

What is the most important factor to success in business?

Perhaps there are a number of qualities and aspects that could be significant here like intelligence, inspiration, communication skills and creativity. But again, where does inspiration come from? Where does the intelligence come from?

They all funnel down to the ability of people to THINK in the correct way. Ultimately, all of the successful elements of business are devised by individuals who, first and foremost, are able to think fittingly to the task.

In simple term, thought is our most valuable thing we have in business that is come from our most valuable factor our HUMAN RESOURCES.