How Many Images Do You See?

This is a picture of a 1500 piece puzzle. You could answer this question by saying that there are 1500 images, some lined up next to each other, some lying scattered on the floor. But even with the puzzle half finished, the human brain perceives one central image – a path running through a pink and white forest. It doesn’t matter that the image is broken up by a hundred different squiggly lines. Our brains are trained to put together pieces to see the whole.

A good example of this is the 19th century art movement Impressionism, which developed in Paris in the 1860’s. It sought to capture the fleeting moments outdoors, particularly the optical and visual effects of light. Artists like Claude Monet used a technique that entailed quick and loose brush strokes to the canvas and gentle transitions between colors in order to depict a particular scene or landscape, aiming to preserve the “essence” – the overall impression— rather than focusing on its details and sharp contours. As a result, looking at an Impressionist painting from up close distorts the visual representation of the whole, giving us only the “parts” that compose it.

There is a scene (watch it here) in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) that shows how an impressionist painting can cease to have meaning depending on the viewer’s perception. A young man stands in front of the painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, a famous example of impressionism. The camera zooms in on the face of a child and as the camera gets closer and closer, the child’s face becomes meaningless, a series of colors that make no sense without the rest of the painting to provide its context.

This ability to see wholes out of pieces helps people move around in the world more comfortably and efficiently. It helps us easily classify objects that we come across, which means we can can make assumptions about them more quickly. For instance, instead of seeing four legs, a horizontal square, and a back, we see a chair (and we recognize that a chair is something that is made to be sat upon). The same example applies to faces. Humans have the ability to put together a nose, two eyes, a mouth, and some hair to see a face. In the painting below (Portrait of Rudolf II by Giuseppe Arcimboldo), a jumble of fruit comes together into something we can perceive as a face. Even though technically the painting is of fruit, the human brain recognizes that there is a face hidden within. This ability to see hidden faces is referred to as “pareidolia.”

The concept of making wholes out of parts can be further explained by something called “Gestalt psychology.” Gestalt psychology refers to theories of the mind from the Berlin School of experimental psychology developed in the 1920s that propose how the mind organizes and perceives unified wholes based on different principles. This idea comes in opposition to structuralism, which attempts to deconstruct and focus on the details that compose the whole. These principles of visual perception are similarity continuation, closure, proximity, figure & ground. The main thinkers that gave rise to these theories were Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Koffka.

“The whole is other than the sum of the parts.”
— Kurt Koffka

The reason we see a bridge when we look at “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” instead of a bunch of meaningless brush strokes – and why we see a path through the woods instead of 1500 individual puzzle pieces – all has to do with our brain’s ability to concoct a whole out of parts.

Works Cited

Josic, Kreso. “Face Recognition.” The Engines of Our Ingenuity. N.p., 2009. Web.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Dir. John Hughes. Paramount Pictures, 1986. Film.
“Impressionism Movement, Artists and Major Works.” The Art Story. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.
“The Gestalt Principles.” The Gestalt Principles. Spokane Falls Community College. Web. 27 Feb. 2016.

Reflection

One strength we had a team was that it was easy to generate ideas that both of us liked. When we tried to narrow our focus, however, it became more difficult to collaborate all the time. The way we overcame this obstacle was that each chose an aspect of the project that we were more interested in and made it more specific individually of each other. For instance, Majo was more interested in the section about impressionist paintings so she expanded on that concept, and Graham was more interested in face recognition because she has self-diagnosed face blindness. Then we brought our pieces together and formed the conclusion as a team. In this way we could divide and conquer without getting in each other’s way.