Pain as a Gestalt
You know the duck/rabbit phenomenon, where a drawing sometimes looks like a duck and sometimes like a rabbit, but never the two at once. This is known as a Gestalt shift, since the whole form (Gestalt) of the drawing changes from one (duck) to the other (rabbit), and each form is in some sense “greater than the sum of its parts,” which are the original lines and curves and their arrangement on the page, which constitute neither the image of a duck nor a rabbit but are ambiguous or just themselves. Another well-known example of Gestalt shift is the Necker cube, another drawing which presents itself to our vision in only one or the other of two distinct aspects – in this case, both times as a cube (and so again not merely the lines or their arrangement on the paper), but with front and back reversed. Well, the other day I was out for a walk. Of late I have been suffering from tendinitis, and so I am used to feeling pain at the back of my left foot with each st