Voiceover: Imagine that you're sitting at home
and you're watching a basketball game on your TV.
What you're actually seeing
are a bunch of still images
put in front of one another
and what you're doing is taking those still images
and putting them together in your head
and basically telling yourself
that you're watching a fluid realistic basketball game.
How was it that we're able to do this?
This is what the gestalt principles
basically attempt to address.
Gestalt principles.
The gestalt principles basically seek to explain
how we perceive things the way we do.
Why is it that we don't tell ourselves
hey, the basketball is just a bunch of pictures
but rather that it's a fluid realistic
representation of a basketball game?
There are several different laws
or principles that the gestaltist came up with
and we're gonna look at each one of these
and look in an example.
Over here we're gonna look at the law
and over here we're gonna write down the definition.
The first law or gestalt principle
is the law of similarity.
Law of similarity.
The law of similarity basically says
the items that are similar to one another
are grouped together by your brain.
Grouped together.
What does this mean?
Let's look at an example.
In this example you can see
that there are squares and there are circles.
Basically there's a square here, there's a circle here
and so on and so forth.
Maybe the first thing that you noticed
was that this image looks like
there were a bunch of squares on top of one another
and a bunch of circles on top of one another.
In other words your brain naturally noticed a pattern.
It naturally notice that the squares
created these vertical column and these ...
Sorry, these circles created this vertical column
and these squares created these vertical column.
Your brain naturally organized this picture
in vertical columns
rather than in this longer horizontal columns.
This is what the first gestalt principle is saying
is that things that are similar to one another,
so circles will be grouped together by your brain.
The second gestalt principle is the law of Pragnanz.
Pragnanz.
This basically says that reality
is often organized or reduced
to the simplest form possible.
Reality is reduced to simplest form.
What do I mean by this?
Let's look at an example again here.
Here you see five circles
that are juxtaposed on top of one another.
What the law of Pragnanz basically says
is that we look a this image
and what we do is break it down into five circles.
Here's one circle, here's two circles.
Why is it that we don't break it down
into more complex shapes so we could look at this object
and say okay, here's this weird diamondy
ovally shape over here
and then there's a semi circle over here,
and then we've got ...
Or you could say here's one line
and then here's another line.
We can look at this and break it down
into much more complicated shapes but we don't.
We look at it and we just notice
that here's a circle
and here's another circle
and they're on top of one another.
We're basically looking at this
fairly complex set of lines
and reducing it down to its simplest form
which is five circles juxtaposed on top of one another
rather than more complex shapes
that are coming together to form this image.
The third gestalt principle or law
is the law of proximity.
Law of proximity.
This basically says that objects
that are close to one another
are grouped together.
Grouped together.
Let's look at an example for the law of proximity.
Over here we see a bunch of circles.
When you look at this image
you naturally notice this pattern,
rectangular pattern of circles
and you notice this other rectangular horizontal
pattern of circles.
These circles are grouped closer together
than this set of circles right here.
Basically your brain ...
Let me just erase this so you can see.
Why is it that we didn't just look at
this set of circles and kind of put them together?
That's because these circles are closer together
than these ones are.
There's more of a distance here
between the circles than there is over here.
Smaller distance.
We naturally look at the distance.
We naturally look at how close different objects are
and group the ones
that are really close to one another together.
The next law is the law of continuity.
The law of continuity basically says
that lines are seen as following the smoothest path.
Lines are seen as following
the smoothest path.
Let's look at an example.
In this example we see again a bunch of circles.
When you look at these
you kind of notice that there's this continuous flow
in this set of circles rather than a flow this way.
That's because the angle here
is much less steep than this angle.
Your brain naturally draws this line over here
and notices that these circles are continuous
whereas these ones are a little bit discontinuous.
Another thing that your brain does
when you're looking at this image
is that it basically takes these circles
and organizes them as one entity.
It puts them together
and notices a pattern that
hey, these circles are forming this continuous line
and it puts together and you group these circles
in one category, in one mental category
than these guys over here
that are in their own separate category.
That's what the law of continuity basically says.
The final law or gestalt principle
is the law of closure.
Law of closure.
Basically this is just saying that
the objects grouped together are seen as a whole.
We ignore gaps and complete contour lines.
Let me just write down the definition.
Objects grouped together
are seen as a whole.
Let's look at an example.
Over here we see this angle over here,
we see this angle, we see this
weird Pacman-looking semi circle thing.
Your mind naturally fills in this triangle.
I don't know if you guys saw this
but there's like this triangle here.
There are gaps
and your mind naturally fills in the gaps.
It fills in the contour lines
and you perceive this triangle.
Let me just go ahead and remove that.
You can see that even though
there isn't actually any triangles in this image
your brain is telling you hey, there's a triangle.
You're noticing this triangle.
That's what the law of closure is basically saying
is that your mind is filling the missing information
to create familiar shapes and images.