Gestalt! When the penny drops

Have you ever heard of the word Gestalt?  It is a German word which is not directly translatable into English. It means ‘pattern’ ‘shape’ or ‘form’.  It is used to refer to wholes, systems, structures.   Some one once described Gestalt to me as a penny dropping moment; that point in the cartoon when Wiley Coyote suddenly realises that the boulder is tied to his own foot and he is about to go over the cliff.

The mind does not like nonsense or anything that it cannot assimilate into previous learning so when presented with a situation, a written example or an image that does not make sense the mind will ‘fill in the gaps’ and this develops our problem solving skills.  It also means sometimes that we see what we want to see or what we expect to see.  A classic example of this is this diagram

What most people will say they see in this case is two triangles and some sort of pac man like shapes.  In fact there are no triangles in this picture.  It is just that the shapes are positioned in a way that gives the impression that there are triangles where in truth there are only lines.  Perhaps this explains why I have passed this particular road sign hundred of times and yet never before realised that it was misspelt

If you can’t work out what I am talking about take another look at the word Whitchurch.  In this case I was seeing what I expected to see; the correctly spelt word.  I think this sign proves one thing that is very important in the world of writing.  Always get someone else to proof read you work because you just cannot see your own mistakes at times.