ABSTRACT
Gestalt is used in more and more diverse areas and hardly anyone doubts its effectiveness. Recent neuroscientific research has brought us better understanding of current cerebral phenomena: in fact, every learning experience and every psychotherapeutic intervention acts directly on cerebral circuitry. Internal brain biochemistry is modified, as is the production of hormones and neurotransmitters. Traditional psychiatrists smiled condescendingly at what psychoanalysts and psychotherapists said; they considered such methods as mere "fashionable worldly entertainment", and they trusted only scientifically tested medication. This chapter briefly investigates "the most complex structure in the Universe", the peak of evolution since the Big Bang: the human brain. At each synapse, the electrical nerve impulse is transformed into a chemical messenger, via minute vesicles which secrete the neuro-transmitters, which emotionally "color" all transmitted information. Gestalt reacts against this "cultural hemiplegia" by rehabilitating the right brain: faces, bodies, movement in space, music, poetry, dreams; subjective, phenomenological qualities.
