Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology (also Gestalt theory of the Berlin School) is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies. The classic Gestalt example is a soap bubble, whose spherical shape is not defined by a rigid template, or a mathematical formula, but rather it emerges spontaneously by the

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parallel action of surface tension acting at all points in the surface simultaneously. This is in contrast to the "atomistic" principle of

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operation of the digital computer, where every computation is broken down into a sequence of simple steps, each of which is computed independently of the problem as a whole.

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The key properties of Gestalt systems are emergence, reification, multistability, and invariance.

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