In lesson three we learn about Gestalts Laws of Perception and just how they influence our lives on a daily basis. Although they are only rule of thumb ideas that help us best figure out a situation and are not official laws that psychologically we follow, we still look to laws of perception for guidance. Within in Gestalts Laws he had different topics areas which include; proximity, similarity, good continuation, connectedness, common fate, and the law of pragnanz. Perception is the ability to understand inner qualities or relationships, and Gestalts Laws help us define different aspects of how and why we perceive things either the same or different from each other. Sometimes we perceive things that are not as bad as we imagine. For example, fear of something, when that certain “thing” may not be as harmful as we perceive it to be.

Perception to me is everything. Not just on a daily basis but throughout my entire life. Thinking back of a time where perception was particularly important to me was when I was in an almost life or death situation. It was a fight or flight moment that happened so quick there was almost no time to perceive anything but danger. When learning about perception in a previous psychology class I learned about the perceptual process and how most times we do it automatically. Step one is observation, and in my case observation was immediate. Step two is perceptual selection in which we selection different aspects of the situation based on level of importance. In this stage we often filter out information that is not useful to us so our focus can be put on the “more important” stimuli. Again, in my situation there was not much time to filter information. It was almost an automatic understanding of the entire event in a matter of seconds. Lastly, step three of the perceptual process is known as perceptual organization. This is where in repeating events we would form the stimuli into a patterns that is understandable by our own standards.

In my opinion perception should be very important to everyone and everyone should learn how to properly perceive different scenarios in their lives. We have a tendency to have a negative perception about things, but in most situations it is not as bad as we think. Life would be a lot easier if we all thought in a more positive manner and realized no matter what situation we are in, it could always be worse.

As you can see, perception is a very complicated yet interesting topic. Although we have Gestalts Laws of Perception, a lot is still open for discussion because his “laws” only provide us with rule of thumb ideas. Perception depends on the situation, but based on how we think about the situation our perceptions can sway either to positive or negative.