Education for Gestalt perception

"When you stop educating your people you start to destroy your civilization. I believe we're taking a sledgehammer to our civilization right now." - Iain McGilchrist, Interview: "Asymmetry and Symmetry" (2022)

"The only true voyage of discovery, is not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others." - Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1923)

"Don't blindly follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they have sought." - Matsuo Basho

"Experience is a master teacher, even when it’s not our own." - Gina Greenlee, Postcards and Pearls (2008)

The civilizational consequences of left hemisphere capture are many. We live in a fragmented society running on a hedonic treadmill to the point of exhaustion. Human relationships and qualities are increasingly marginalized, while the "Internet of things" and the "quantified self" are optimized, part of the left hemisphere's last ditch effort to create a simulacrum of the right hemisphere world. Nonetheless, both of these are for the most part devoid of intrinsic significance. This fractured view of the world spills over into education, work, and the economy in extremely harmful ways affecting each of us. Western civilization has been swallowed by an idealized version of the market, infecting our cultural psychology and social norms. 

But here I want to focus on the very high cost this imposes on youth. For many of the youth alive today, as they grow and mature to become "productive members" of society, this widespread representational thinking within the economic sector, to the almost complete exclusion of right hemisphere forms of engagement, is often felt most acutely when they face a choice to either enter the workforce or continue education and training for a more specialized position. Not only is the choice itself artificial and unnecessary, but many youth are asked to make it effectively blind.

They are given a very fragmented view of the world in a thousand pieces. From these they must try to assemble a coherent whole without having much of a clue beforehand of exactly what it is they are putting together. As McGilchrist has noted, seeing the whole before the pieces is a far more natural and intuitive form of engagement. But the guidance and understanding necessary to make an informed choice has not been provided to many youth today. 

“No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees - trees are invisible.” ― Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018) 

Some years ago Finland mandated that "phenomenon-based learning", a process where new information is applied to a phenomenon or problem, was to be provided alongside traditional subject-based instruction in schools. This is a positive development, as it places subjects within a context. One might describe it as a kind of "Gestalt education". Compare this to what confronts most youth in America who may be considering a college education: a list of fields of study, often numbering over a hundred, arranged in several subdivided groups, with an obligatory nod to the value of interdisciplinary study. However well intended, I don't think this is sufficient. 

It is the right hemisphere that is engaged in Gestalt perception. "The right hemisphere sees... a multitude of individually unique wholes, or Gestalten, that themselves form part of an ever greater Gestalt" (The Matter with Things). While the left hemisphere is more engaged in abstract representations of isolated features and relationships. Although these models can and do have their uses, particularly in revealing otherwise invisible patterns, the resulting complex network often lacks a "feel for the whole" (Christopher Alexander), and may hinder understanding if it obscures the terrain to which it ostensibly refers. Gestalt perception of the economy is needed, not so much to control it as to understand it. The kind of attention we provide may determine whether we see "Moloch" (Schmachtenberger's 'game theory monster') or a "Social-Ecological System" (Ostrom). Local level interactions will invariably be understood within that larger context. 

Like many of you, I know young people who are trying to find their way in the world. And I think it's our responsibility to help guide them as they make education and work choices. The topic has been addressed many times before. John Ehrenfeld has written on it, both in his books, articles, and commentary. Others have more recently described the importance of doing the real work of caring for people. 

This falls under action, because either we are making choices for ourselves with immediate consequences for personal finances, quality of life, and larger social impacts, or we are advising others for whom these consequences are very real. Education and work is also a theme frequently addressed in conversations with McGilchrist. And even though some of us may have left the workforce, I'd wager many of us are either still very active or pursuing other goals that involve a similar commitment of time and energy. (I still put in a full work week, on top of all those other pursuits.) 

The implications of the fragmentation of education extend still further. Consider the inversion of contemporary values. Insofar as any are still salient, they have been reduced as far as possible, another consequence of the disintegration of Gestalt perception. If this were rectified it could invert the relative attention, prestige, and remuneration accorded to various occupations. Clearly, for the most part, this hasn't happened in the world today. The pure instrumentalism of money management still demands the highest salaries. But as Tom Morgan noted, work in finance is "spectacularly meaningless", unless it is synthesized with spirituality (the jury may be out on whether that's possible).

My own views on work and education have shifted over recent years. During the early months of the global response to the Covid pandemic, like many people, I went into 'survival mode'. To describe this using the language of Max Scheler's hierarchy of values, I was focused on the base of the pyramid, the utilitarian importance of "universal basic services" for meeting basic needs, and the "essential workers" who were placing their personal health on the line for the rest of us, with or without hazard pay. Essential workers occupy important 'bottleneck points' in the economy. At the time, we collectively faced a situation whose full consequences were still unknown.

Some of us still live in crisis response mode, in an uncomfortable position of not fully trusting larger social structures, while still to some degree dependent upon them. And accordingly, the desire to be able to live locally and resiliently is going to be relatively more or less important. (Localism was a key focus of Helen Norberg-Hodge's recent Planet Local Summit.) But even in a crisis we need the sacred to survive. As Thich Naht Hanh has shown, anything can be done with the full attention of our heart and soul.

Indeed, just as important as "what" we do is "how" we do it, as has been recently noted. Is the LH in service to the RH? Are the utilitarian tasks of life in service to the sacredness of all? Are the technologies, design, and structures of our lives truly responsive to life? This is axiological design (Zak Stein). Or, are all those blind by design (Shoshana Zuboff). Are the hemispheres working together, drawing upon their uniquely asymmetric strengths to achieve something that neither alone could do? Before abstraction and analysis, job seekers and students begin with a feel for intrinsic value, an ability to perceive the Gestalt, the implicit phenomena, and respond to a motivating telos, among other things. But I think the Gestalt may be the most glaring omission today. Can parents, school counselors, occupational therapists, and academic advising centers prepare people in this way?

Much of the bloated bureaucratic structure of school and work stands in the way of encouraging the natural inclination of youth to apprehend the Gestalt through direct engagement and "imaginatively inhabiting" the lives of others, whether human or animal. (Anarchists like Carne Ross are perhaps among the most critical of bureaucratic overgrowth.) The memetic practice begins in make-believe and apprenticeship, and culminates in mastery and leadership, creating learning situations in which youth learn through working alongside more expert peers or adults. Rather than segregate children from an early age, we should include them in all work. This is the norm in many non-Western cultures, and helps to promote a sense of self-efficacy and responsibility. Rather than isolating phenomena artificially according to feature, one field of work and study interpenetrates with another. The contemporary educational model in America, of imposing a dichotomy between college-educated versus trade-school or working class upon our career options, is another strange artifact of Western society as the most rewarding work tends to reflect an interdisciplinary approach that combines aspects of both academic and trade work. Each informs and enriches the other. 

If a Gestalt is acquired through a shift in perspective (most dramatically from the "emissary" to the "master", but also from one person to another) then we must equip the youth with a wide corpus of perspectives in this way. Instead of handing a college applicant a list of major fields of study, they might select from among a variety of unique perspectives that yet merge and interpenetrate with each other (Anaxagoras), setting them on course for a career that evolves and enriches the Gestalten thus beheld. And so, as Stephen Asma would write, imagination "should stand as the interdisciplinary foundation underlying both art and science." McGilchrist described the perspectival shift of imagination as "seeing into the depths of something that you think you know, but seeing it for the first time. You're finally making contact with it." But this can't be compelled. We can’t incept a perspective within someone or force contact with a Gestalt. Cristine Legare said "innovation always builds upon imitation", but insofar as imitation requires one to perceive a Gestalt and take the perspective from which it is held, it's not a simple and straightforward process. Since each of us has a singularly unique perspective, when it comes to imitation, in sameness there is difference (Sandokai). 

Now put all this into "plain English" (or whatever the vernacular language may be) for a young man or woman of 16 or 18, full of enormous potential, staring at a list of job options and major fields of study as though it were a labyrinth of pathways, each as indecipherable as the next, and about to commit their time, energy, money, hopes, and dreams for the future. This is the situation many face today. These youth encountered their first role models for "how to live" within their families. As their social circles expanded to include larger community groups and broader social movements, they learned about other leaders and role models, and why they are those particular individuals.

Such exemplary people see the Gestalt of their movement or field of work (the larger mission, vision, or pattern of engagement) more clearly than most. They become living archetypes, as it were. And so imitating them and taking up their perspective on the whole can provide one with a view upon that Gestalt. To be sure, some youth have made a confident choice already. But for those who are still seeking, perhaps the most important goal of education is enhancing our innate capacity for Gestalt perception via introduction to the perspectives of others upon the whole. These are the processes of mimesis/alterity (Michael Taussig). This is the "imaginative inhabiting of the other" (McGilchrist). The arts and humanities are critical to this process, but even a brief biographical sketch or mini-documentary can introduce a new world. Paraphrasing McGilchrist once again:

"This can be driven by a feeling of attraction which results in our apprehending the whole and trying to feel what that must be like from the inside - by so to speak an imaginative inhabiting of the other, which is always different because of its intersubjective betweenness. The process of mimesis is one of intention, aspiration, attraction and empathy, drawing heavily on the right hemisphere. It is not mechanical reproduction; copying is the following of disembodied procedures and algorithms, which is left-hemisphere-based." (121, 240-256 The Master and His Emissary)

More context

"It's not new procedures we need: it's new shapes, new Gestalten - new wholes. ...We need to bring ourselves to see a new Gestalt, one in which what seem like fragments of knowledge form part of a coherent whole." - McGilchrist (The Matter with Things) 

"When you come to look at the stories of many great findings by mathematicians and scientists, they made these discoveries by having a broad attention which saw new shapes, new forms, new Gestalten, which are wholes that cannot be decomposed into their parts without loss." - McGilchrist (interview with Damien Walter) 

"What the right brain delivers is wholeness, and in this again it has a peculiar resonance and relationship with therapy. For the whole purpose of therapy is wholeness – the very word “health” (as in “mental health”) means wholeness (O.E. hælan, “to make whole, sound and well”). And wholeness is the result of integration: “healing emerges from integration”, note Siegel and Solomon, again pointing to the intimate connections between healing, health, and wholeness." - Rod Tweedy (2020)

"The Sympathetic Mind... looks upon people and other creatures as whole beings... it is the mind of our wholeness." - Wendell Berry, "Two Minds" (Citizenship Papers, 2003)

I live and work with many youth, some within my family, who wrestle with these sort of questions. And I can certainly relate to their concerns. I can also relate to the efforts of the parents and educators who are trying to guide them as they make some big life decisions. If I look back on my own early educational experiences, I struggled mightily in many ways. To be sure, it wasn't only for lack of sufficient Gestalt perception that the experience wasn't as smooth as it might've otherwise been. There were other problems. And it would be foolish to think that it's possible, or even desirable, to eliminate the challenges of youth, many of which are in some sense necessary for growth and maturation.

Furthermore, it's not to say that there was absolutely no movement in this direction. More than a few people tried to convey the "big picture" view to me. And I met many exemplary role models, each of whom was able to introduce me, in some way, to the Gestalt they beheld from their perspective. So then, did these attempts simply not go far enough? In short, I do suspect that they were not sufficient to counteract the overwhelming effects of a cultural zeitgeist of fragmentation pulling still stronger and more persistently in the other direction. As Duncan Austin wrote:

"The left brain divides and divides again to end up chasing the Higgs Boson. The right brain patterns gestalt after gestalt eventually reaching Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis – ‘it is all one thing’ including this mind thinking this thought – and from there, perhaps, out beyond ‘science’ and towards the sacred."

I'm not advocating for anything as specific as a "McGilchristian school system". But I am considering what effective interventions, across all scales, might look like. There are of course many different approaches to education out there, such as the Montessori method. And there are many different kinds of charter schools, apprenticeship programs, etc. No doubt some of these focus on Gestalt perception (by any name) more than others. But do they put this into practice and apply it broadly? This cannot merely remain some abstract idea or minor adjunct, there's a more pragmatic and central need for this. Maybe a review of prior work on the place of "Gestalt perception" and the importance of "exemplars", and how each of these in turn reinforces the other within the context of both educational and occupational development, would turn up some results. The question is: Can we take those results, reintegrate them with the implications of the hemisphere hypothesis, and then put all this into practice? 

While there are many articles outlining the use of exemplars in education, these typically refer to "key examples chosen so as to be typical of designated levels of quality of competence" in student work. In other words, these are exemplars of student homework, not exemplars of the future occupational role a student may be considering that could provide a bigger picture view of work and life after graduation. Gestalt perception should extend beyond the classroom into all forms of social engagement, including political commentaries for example, and provide an overall moderating influence on the vicissitudes of life that by turns both humble and lift us up (often when we least desire or expect either of these). Speculatively, would it be possible to leverage LLMs (large language models) like chatGPT, in the role of a "good servant", to help provide a narrative structure or mythopoetic description to promote a more holistic Gestalt perspective? One might engineer a prompt such as "Who are the most accomplished people to have worked in the field of [blank]? Please provide a short biographical sketch of their life. Include how their educational (hero's) journey contributed to their current work, what their work related accomplishments have been, how these have affected the lives of others, and why they find it meaningful." A start, perhaps. 

In so many words, this might be an alternative educational classification system or form of "knowledge organization". In this case, it is the organization of knowledge according to Gestalten. This may be challenging because it is not clear whether these are distinct, overlapping, or hierarchical Gestalten, in terms of their overall scope or nested structure. On the one hand, they may simply be different views upon the same reality. And so in light of such instrumental deficiencies, as a method of classification it will always need to be supplemented by, and advanced in parallel with, the more "left hemisphere" classificatory systems, which for example can be seen in the Wikipedia articles titled "outline of academic disciplines" and "list of academic fields" (no comparably exhaustive articles appear to exist for occupations, though this may be because these are in some sense subsumed within the academic categorization articles). The result would be a dual description of the school-to-work pipeline that corresponds to our two principle ways of attending to reality - as fragmentary pieces and integrated wholes. And this might allow students to better apprehend the educational experience and the larger economy that they increasingly participate in. 

Can a searchable database or "outline of academic disciplines" be paired with an "outline of academic Gestalten"? Can a "list of occupational fields" be paired with a "list of occupational exemplars"? The right hemisphere must compliment, or rather underwrite, the left hemisphere. If this can't be done, then a separate "exemplars in education" or "New Gestalten" website might be created to serve this sort of purpose. Currently "job fairs" provide an opportunity for students to learn the broader Gestalt of occupations, and business consultants help existing employees in the same way, but some of the most desired positions are also the least advertised. As they say, it pays to do your homework. How valuable might it be for a student to be able to search for the most employable occupations (volume), the most critical services (basic needs), or the fastest developing area (research and technology), then compare these isolated features with the corresponding Gestalten so that they can evaluate them according to how well they align with their own aspirations for a good life? Again, the currently available scholastic aptitude tests and career quizzes are inadequate. They fragment a student's Gestalt into a collection of isolated features in a very left hemispheric way. And more importantly, they fail to increase a student's understanding of the overall Gestalt they aspire to apprehend, imitate, and eventually embody. [Another question is whether freelance job sites like FlexJobs, Upwork, and Fiverr, and employment websites like 'Craigslist Jobs', 'Indeed', and others can be redesigned to display a 'gestaltic organizational format'. Advertising local position availability using gestalt analysis, highlighting the gestaltic aspect of work, would be an interesting twist on the employment matching services market.]

In practice, local colleges and universities rarely offer a comprehensive selection of fields to explore, and more confusingly they often use parochial terminology for what are often the same subjects. However they do offer a valuable entry point from which to begin the journey to competency within any given field. So if we begin with the simple desire to learn more about what a good life might look like (RH), then explore the Wikipedia outline of disciplines (LH), correlate those to exemplary Gestalten (RH), and find the corresponding major course of study offered by the local educational/training institution (LH), we may have a way to navigate this labyrinthine world and "begin with the end in mind", an integrated view of what the journey for us might be, now enriched by a broader and more detailed Gestalt (RH). Beginning with the end is of course Stephen Covey's famously telic advice.

In the Introduction of The Matter with Things, McGilchrist lists some of the "headline differences" between the versions of the world revealed by either hemisphere. The left hemisphere view is of a world composed of "fragmentary elements" that are "relatively uncomplicated by issues of beauty and morality". Whereas the right hemisphere permits both Gestalt perception and value-ception. If we were to dissolve Gestalten, values essentially disappear as well. And if we lack a capacity for Gestalt perception to begin with, all this "value talk" is essentially incoherent. These are mutually reinforcing, inseparable aspects of the phenomenology of the right hemisphere, both of which, along with all those other headline differences, deserve greater attention in education. Gestalt perception (the antithesis of reductionism) appears to be in some sense a prerequisite for value-ception. It underwrites a lot of other capacities we rely upon as well. So many, in fact, that it is generally taken for granted, even in our left hemisphere captured society. But it is also under-developed and often misunderstood. For example we tend to view complex (highly polyphyletic) units of selection (such as holobionts, ecosystems, and Gaia) as collections of parts or abstract patterns more often than intrinsically unique wholes. Hence this mini-essay. By comparison, value-ception may be a more highly refined capacity, and is not nearly as widely understood or accepted. Which would explain the relatively greater amount of space and time McGilchrist devotes to describing the importance of value in both his writing and speaking.

More quotable lines

• "You could know all about a crow flying but you wouldn't know a flock.” - Amy Hodler (2019) 
• "We are in a period of science in which we have reached the current limits of reductionism in many domains. Despite their typical presentation as a mutually exclusive dichotomous choice, it seems that science requires both reductionist and holistic approaches to be successful." - Borrett, Moody, and Edelmann (2013)
• "The fragmentation of knowledge proves helpful for concrete applications, and yet it often leads to a loss of appreciation for the whole... [this] can actually become a form of ignorance, unless they [the parts] are integrated into a broader vision of reality." - Laudato Si' (2015)
• "One thing you might try is to study the magic key. You might try to prove theorems and so forth about what the key can do. But while this work is very important and interesting, in order to solve the puzzle, you have to also study the locks!” - Henry Lin (2017) 
• “I did not train you to be a demon or a human. I showed you how to be an artist… Swords, pots, noodles, death. It is all the same to an artist…. There may be a demon in you, but there is more. If you do not invite the whole, the demon takes two chairs, and your art will suffer.” - Master Eiji, Blue Eye Samurai (2023) 
• "What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you?" – Gregory Bateson
• "Wisdom is related to wholes and wholeness. The underlying cause of the problem is a consciousness that perceives parts rather than wholes or the nature of wholeness - that which guides our manipulation of parts, i.e. technology." - Daniel Schmachtenberger
• The sum of its parts is lesser than the whole. [Kaufman compares left/right hemispheres to 'task positive'/ 'task negative' networks, finding overlapping themes. While either hemisphere in isolation can sustain something like a personality, neither network could do the same, at which point the comparison breaks down.]:

Kaufman: "I can't help but notice linkages between things you wrote in 1982 in Against Criticism and things you wrote in 2021 in The Matter with Things. You say in Against Criticism, "The understanding of any one thing requires an understanding of the whole of which it is a part". That seems to capture a lot of your interest in brain asymmetry, right?
McGilchrist: "It does. I just see this as being a very important issue throughout. At school I already thought the whole is not the same as the sum of the parts. And people would say to me "Okay, so what's this extra something then that you put in?" At the time I didn't think of saying "It's not that something needs to be put in, it's that something has been taken out in the process of disassembling it."