What does this render method do: const {images, selectedImage} = this.state;?
<p>I'm doing a simple tutorial on react/ redux and I do not understand why we have to, in the render() method, do </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>const {images, selectedImage} = this.state;</p>
</blockquote>

<p>I understand that we need to assign the previously defined variables to the constructor, so it becomes part of our component state and is not just a variable floating around in our component only, but I do no get why we cannot just access them directly in the render method later? I also do not understand why they are defined as constants? I also don't get why they are assigned to state and why they have parentheses aroudn them? Thanks a lot for your help</p>

<pre><code>import React, {Component} from 'react'

const flickrImages = [
  "https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1553/25266806624_fdd55cecbc.jpg",
  "https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1581/25283151224_50f8da511e.jpg",
  "https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1653/25265109363_f204ea7b54.jpg",
  "https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1571/25911417225_a74c8041b0.jpg",
  "https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1450/25888412766_44745cbca3.jpg"
];

export default class Gallery extends Component {
  constructor(props) {
    super(props);
    this.state = {
      images: flickrImages,
      selectedImage: flickrImages[0]
    }
  }

  handleThumbClick(selectedImage) {
    this.setState({
      selectedImage
    })
  }

  render() {
    const {images, selectedImage} = this.state; // why do we have to do this? And why does this need to be a constant?
    return (
      &lt;div className="image-gallery"&gt;
        &lt;div className="gallery-image"&gt;
          &lt;div&gt;
            &lt;img src={selectedImage} /&gt;
          &lt;/div&gt;
        &lt;/div&gt;
        &lt;div className="image-scroller"&gt;
          {images.map((image, index) =&gt; (
            &lt;div key={index} onClick={this.handleThumbClick.bind(this,image)}&gt;
              &lt;img src={image}/&gt;
            &lt;/div&gt;
          ))}
        &lt;/div&gt;
      &lt;/div&gt;
    )
  }
}
</code></pre>

<p>PS: if you can suggest a better title for this question please let me know, i was not sure what to call it, and I'm sure there's a better name the sort of thing that's being done here</p>