Gestalt Pattern Recognition & Universal Human Consciousness

People are all different and yet all the same, and therein lies the great paradox for cultural anthropology to solve. People suffer culture shock when they live in contexts for extended periods of time that are foreign to their native orientation. People form deeply rooted organic and psychological attachments to their homes and cultures. How and why this happens is not well understood.

The educational principles of the Bridge are founded upon a theory of how the human brain functions on all levels to achieve awareness and responsive mastery to its environments. This theory is that human perception and cognition at all levels of mental processing are fundamentally gestalt pattern recognition in principle--people see, hear, understand and react to things in their world according to how they construe these things in the context of relations in which they are presented and received. This provides a scientific and systematic methodological and operational handle onto understanding not only how humans everywhere normally think and act, and create symbols and communicate in social settings, but also to how they learn and can be induced to acquire new knowledge, understanding and patterns of response. In a sense, the human brain is a complex multi-sensory pattern recognition device. It construes patterns not only spatially and visually, but also temporally and aurally--it recognizes and comprehends things automatically according to how these things "fit" into their "natural" or man-made contexts, especially in conventional ways. Much of this processing is implicit and automatic, therefore out of awareness, but even conscious frames of mind and deliberate, directive awareness and behavior are also structured "symbolically" in the same manner. Evidence suggests that even highly "logical" activities such as mathematical calculations are still founded upon principles of gestalt pattern recognition.

Symbolic framing tasks have been developed that provide researchers a handle onto understanding the complexities of human cognition and consciousness--of how the mind works. These tasks can be applied productively not only to the elicitation of patterns of response for purposes of research, but for the purpose of developing educational methods for facilitating acquisition of new information at many different levels.

It is the aim of the Bridge to actively develop and refine these methods for the purpose of improving and facilitating acquisition in all areas.

February 19, 2000