rigorousintuition.ca

brekin wrote:Searcher08 you seem extremely knowledgeable in this arena which is great.
I was wondering if you knew how the eye patterning part of NLP developed?
Was this something coming out of Erickson hypnosis?
Also if you have any basic explanatory info on how eye patterning is done I
would really appreciate that.

A CONJUGATE lateral eye movement has been observed in humans in association with the shift from external to internal direction of attention1. When asked a question requiring reflexion (for example, mental arithmetic) an individual normally shifts his eyes either to the right or the left as he begins to reflect on an answer. It has been suggested that the direction of this lateral eye movement is related to a characteristic deployment of attention; left movers show a greater tendency to focus attention on internal subjective experiences, right movers show a greater tendency to external focus of attention2. It has been found that subjects who tend to move their eyes to the left are more likely to be hypnotizable3. Hypnotizability has also been shown to be related to amount of EEG alpha activity during an eyes-closed resting condition4,5. The relationship of both lateral direction of eye movements and amount of EEG alpha activity to hypnotizability seems to indicate the need for a study of the relationship between amount of resting EEG alpha activity and the direction of reflective lateral eye movements. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that the tendency to move the eyes to the left is associated with more EEG alpha activity than is the tendency to move the eyes to the right.

Source: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

This is from the end notes to a sci-fi book, so if you don't get a reference, roll with it...or get the book: it's excellent. Blindsight, by Peter Watts.

Sleight of Mind

The Human sensorium is remarkably easy to hack; our visual system has been described as an improvised "bag of tricks" at best. Our sense organs acquire such fragmentary, imperfect input that the brain has to interpret their data using rules of probability rather than direct perception. It doesn't so much see the world as make an educated guess about it. As a result, "improbable" stimuli tends to go unprocessed at the conscious level, no matter how strong the input. We tend to simply ignore sights and sound that don't fit with our worldview.

For example, the invisibility trick of that young, dumb scrambler— the one who restricted its movement to the gaps in Human vision— occured to me while reading about something called inattentional blindness. A Russian guy called Yarbus was the first to figure out the whole saccadal glitch in Human vision, back in the nineteen sixties. Since then, a variety of researchers have made objects pop in and out of the visual field unnoticed, conducted conversations with hapless subjects who never realised that their conversational partner had changed halfway through the interview, and generally proven that the Human brain just fails to notice an awful lot of what's going on around it. Check out the demos at the website of the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois19 and you'll see what I mean. This really is rather mind-blowing, people. There could be Scientologists walking among us right now and if they moved just right, we'd never even see them.

Most of the psychoses, syndromes, and hallucinations described herein are real, and are described in detail by Metzinger, Wegner, and/or Sacks (see also Sentience/Intelligence, below). Others (e.g. Grey Syndrome) have not yet made their way into the DSM —truth be told, I invented a couple — but are nonetheless based on actual experimental evidence. Depending upon whom you believe, the judicious application of magnetic fields to the brain can provoke everything from religious rapture to a sense of being abducted by aliens. Transcranial magnetic stimulation can change mood, induce blindness, or target the speech centers (making one unable to pronounce verbs, for example, while leaving the nouns unimpaired). Memory and learning can be enhanced (or impaired), and the US Government is presently funding research into wearable TMS gear for—you guessed it— military purposes.

Sometimes electrical stimulation of the brain induces "alien hand syndrome"— the involuntary movement of the body against the will of the "person" allegedly in control. Other times it provokes equally involuntary movements, which subjects nonetheless insist they "chose" to perform despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary. Put all this together with the fact that the body begins to act before the brain even "decides" to move, and the whole concept of free will—despite the undeniable subjective feeling that it's real—begins to look a teeny bit silly, even outside the influence of alien artefacts.

While electromagnetic stimulation is currently the most trendy approach to hacking the brain, it's hardly the only one. Gross physical disturbances ranging from tumors to tamping irons can turn normal people into psychopaths and pedophiles (hence that new persona sprouting in Susan James's head). Spirit possession and rapture can be induced through the sheer emotional bump-and-grind of religious rituals, using no invasive neurological tools at all (and not even necessarily any pharmacological ones). People can even develop a sense of ownership of body parts that aren't theirs, can be convinced that a rubber hand is their real one. Vision trumps propioreception: a prop limb, subtly manipulated, is enough to convince us that we're doing one thing while in fact we're doing something else entirely.

The latest tool in this arsenal is ultrasound: less invasive than electromagnetics, more precise than charismatic revival, it can be used to boot up brain activity without any of those pesky electrodes or magnetic hairnets. In Blindsight it serves as a convenient back door to explain why Rorschach's hallucinations persist even in the presence of Faraday shielding— but in the here and now, Sony has been renewing an annual patent for a machine which uses ultrasonics to implant "sensory experiences" directly into the brain. They're calling it an entertainment device with massive applications for online gaming. Uh huh. And if you can implant sights and sounds into someone's head from a distance, why not implant political beliefs and the irresistable desire for a certain brand of beer while you're at it?

Sentience/Intelligence

This is the heart of the whole damn exercise. Let's get the biggies out of the way first. Metzinger's Being No One is the toughest book I've ever read (and there are still significant chunks of it I haven't), but it also contains some of the most mindblowing ideas I've encountered in fact or fiction. Most authors are shameless bait-and-switchers when it comes to the nature of consciousness. Pinker calls his book How the Mind Works, then admits on page one that "We don't understand how the mind works". Koch (the guy who coined the term "zombie agents") writes The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, in which he sheepishly sidesteps the whole issue of why neural activity should result in any kind of subjective awareness whatsoever.

Towering above such pussies, Metzinger takes the bull by the balls. His "World-zero" hypothesis not only explains the subjective sense of self, but also why such an illusory first-person narrator would be an emergent property of certain cognitive systems in the first place. I have no idea whether he's right— the man's way beyond me— but at least he addressed the real question that keeps us staring at the ceiling at three a.m., long after the last roach is spent. Many of the syndromes and maladies dropped into Blindsight I first encountered in Metzinger's book. Any uncited claims or statements in this subsection probably hail from that source.

If they don't, then maybe they hail from Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will instead. Less ambitious, far more accessible, Wegner's book doesn't so much deal with the nature of consciousness as it does with the nature of free will, which Wegner thumbnails as "our mind's way of estimating what it thinks it did.". Wegner presents his own list of syndromes and maladies, all of which reinforce the mind-boggling sense of what fragile and subvertible machines we are. And of course, Oliver Sacks was sending us memos from the edge of consciousness long before consciousness even had a bandwagon to jump on.

It might be easier to list the people who haven't taken a stab at "explaining" consciousness. Theories run the gamut from diffuse electrical fields to quantum puppet-shows; consciousness has been "located" in the frontoinsular cortex and the hypothalamus and a hundred dynamic cores in between. (At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adult Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a certain fondness for this conclusion; if children aren't nonsentient, they're certainly psychopathic).

But beneath the unthreatening, superficial question of what consciousness is floats the more functional question of what it's good for. Blindsight plays with that issue at length, and I won't reiterate points already made. Suffice to say that, at least under routine conditions, consciousness does little beyond taking memos from the vastly richer subconcious environment, rubber-stamping them, and taking the credit for itself. In fact, the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper in the anterious cingulate cortex to do nothing but prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations. (If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.)

Sentience isn't even necessary to develop a "theory of mind". That might seem completely counterintuitive: how could you learn to recognise that other individuals are autonomous agents, with their own interests and agendas, if you weren't even aware of your own? But there's no contradiction, and no call for consciousness. It is entirely possible to track the intentions of others without being the slightest bit self-reflective. Norretranders declared outright that "Consciousness is a fraud".

Art might be a bit of an exception. Aesthetics seem to require some level of self-awareness—in fact, the evolution of aethestics might even be what got the whole sentience ball rolling in the first place. When music is so beautiful if makes you shiver, that's the reward circuitry in your limbic system kicking in: the same circuitry that rewards you for fucking an attractive partner or gorging on sucrose. It's a hack, in other words; your brain has learned how to get the reward without actually earning it through increased fitness. It feels good, and it fulfills us, and it makes life worth living. But it also turns us inward and distracts us. Those rats back in the sixties, the ones that learned to stimulate their own pleasure centers by pressing a lever: remember them? They pressed those levers with such addictive zeal that they forgot to eat. They starved to death. I've no doubt they died happy, but they died. Without issue. Their fitness went to Zero.

Aesthetics. Sentience. Extinction.

And that brings us to the final question, lurking way down in the anoxic zone: the question of what consciousness costs. Compared to nonconscious processing, self-awareness is slow and expensive. (The premise of a separate, faster entity lurking at the base of our brains to take over in emergencies is based on studies by, among others, Joe LeDoux of New York University). By way of comparison, consider the complex, lightning-fast calculations of savantes; those abilities are noncognitive, and there is evidence that they owe their superfunctionality not to any overarching integration of mental processes but due to relative neurological fragmentation. Even if sentient and nonsentient processes were equally efficient, the conscious awareness of visceral stimuli—by its very nature— distracts the individual from other threats and opportunities in its environment. (I was quite proud of myself for that insight. You'll understand how peeved I was to discover that Wegner had already made a similar point back in 1994.) The cost of high intelligence has even been demonstrated by experiments in which smart fruit flies lose out to dumb ones when competing for food, possibly because the metabolic demands of learning and memory leave less energy for foraging. No, I haven't forgotten that I've just spent a whole book arguing that intelligence and sentience are different things. But this is still a relevant experiment, because one thing both attributes do have in common is that they are metabolically expensive. (The difference is, in at least some cases intelligence is worth the price. What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?)

While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. Blindsight is a thought experiment, a game of Just suppose and What if. Nothing more.

On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superiority, a thousand years ago: if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct? Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.

Cunningham's stats about self-recognition in primates: those too are real. Chimpanzees have a higher brain-to-body ratio than orangutans, yet orangs consistently recognise themselves in mirrors while chimps do so only half the time. Similarly, those nonhuman species with the most sophisticated language skills are a variety of birds and monkeys—not the presumably "more sentient" great apes who are our closest relatives. If you squint, facts like these suggest that sentience might almost be a phase, something that orangutans haven't yet grown out of but which their more-advanced chimpanzee cousins are beginning to.

(Gorillas don't self-recognise in mirrors. Perhaps they've already grown out of sentience, or perhaps they never grew into it.) Of course, Humans don't fit this pattern. If it even is a pattern. We're outliers: that's one of the points I'm making.

I bet vampires would fit it, though. That's the other one.

Finally, some very timely experimental support for this unpleasant premise came out just as Blindsight was being copy edited: it turns out that the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind. The conscious mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it.”

Founded by the prominent cognitive linguist George Lakoff, the Rockridge Institute sought to examine the way that frames—the mental structures that influence our thinking, often unconsciously—determine our opinions and values. Based on extensive research in human cognition, the Rockridge Institute argued that the way an issue is framed—the language used to describe it and the metaphors used to understand it—influences our political views as much, or more, than the particulars of a given policy.

Accordingly, the Rockridge Institute attempted to monitor the manipulative use of framing, particularly by right wing organizations and politicians, and to promote frames that encourage progressive thinking. A much discussed example of framing is the Bush administration's use of the phrase War on Terror to describe its policies following the September 11th attacks. The use of the "war" metaphor, the Rockridge Institute and others contended, had a tremendous effect on U.S. policy and public debate. They further contended it has allowed the president to assume war powers, makes opposition to the "war" seem unpatriotic, and was used to justify the invasion of Iraq, although cooperation between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had not occurred.[7] If the U.S. response to September 11 had been framed as a criminal proceeding, the Rockridge Institute and others argued, such extraordinary measures would never have garnered sufficient political support.

The Rockridge Institute sought to raise consciousness about manipulative framing and to propose progressive frames on a wide range of issues, including the economy, immigration, religion, and the environment.

Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics

By Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter | 27 October 2003

BERKELEY – With Republicans controlling the Senate, the House, and the White House and enjoying a large margin of victory for California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's clear that the Democratic Party is in crisis. George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, thinks he knows why. Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff.

The work has paid off: by dictating the terms of national debate, conservatives have put progressives firmly on the defensive.

...

Why was the Rockridge Institute created, and how do you define its purpose?

I got tired of cursing the newspaper every morning. I got tired of seeing what was going wrong and not being able to do anything about it.

The background for Rockridge is that conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing. Even the new Center for American Progress, the think tank that John Podesta [former chief of staff for the Clinton administration] is setting up, is not dedicated to this at all. I asked Podesta who was going to do the Center's framing. He got a blank look, thought for a second and then said, "You!" Which meant they haven't thought about it at all. And that's the problem. Liberals don't get it. They don't understand what it is they have to be doing.

Rockridge's job is to reframe public debate, to create balance from a progressive perspective. It's one thing to analyze language and thought, it's another thing to create it. That's what we're about. It's a matter of asking 'What are the central ideas of progressive thought from a moral perspective?'

How does language influence the terms of political debate?

Language always comes with what is called "framing." Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like "revolt," that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That's a frame.
If you then add the word "voter" in front of "revolt," you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like "voter revolt" - something that most people read and never notice. But these things can be affected by reporters and very often, by the campaign people themselves.

Here's another example of how powerful framing is. In Arnold Schwarzenegger's acceptance speech, he said, "When the people win, politics as usual loses." What's that about? Well, he knows that he's going to face a Democratic legislature, so what he has done is frame himself and also Republican politicians as the people, while framing Democratic politicians as politics as usual - in advance. The Democratic legislators won't know what hit them. They're automatically framed as enemies of the people.

Why do conservatives appear to be so much better at framing?

Because they've put billions of dollars into it. Over the last 30 years their think tanks have made a heavy investment in ideas and in language. In 1970, [Supreme Court Justice] Lewis Powell wrote a fateful memo to the National Chamber of Commerce saying that all of our best students are becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed to do something about it. Powell's agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks. He outlined the whole thing in 1970. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the Manhattan Institute after that. [There are many others, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which date from the 1940s.]

And now, as the New York Times Magazine quoted Paul Weyrich, who started the Heritage Foundation, they have 1,500 conservative radio talk show hosts. They have a huge, very good operation, and they understand their own moral system. They understand what unites conservatives, and they understand how to talk about it, and they are constantly updating their research on how best to express their ideas.

THE HISTORY OF NLP’s IDENTITY CONFUSION 1975– 1980s

From the beginning NLP has had an identity confusion. After all, what is it? What exactly is this thing that we call Neuro-Linguistic Programming? Now if you ask the people who should know, even NLP trainers, you will actually get all kinds of answers. So the confusion exists even here.

For example, many of them will identify NLP as a form of therapy. “It’s a new form of psychotherapy,”many will assert. True enough,this field began from the field of therapy as it was modeled from therapists and because it has at its heart many therapeutic processes. Yet while it began from there, that’s not what NLP is.

The big confusion that confusing NLP with therapy has created for the field of NLP has been highly problematic from the beginning. And yet, how that confusion came to be makes perfect sense. After all, NLP was modeled from three therapists, three world-class communicators who worked with hurting people who needed healing. So it really isn’t a big surprise that many people, right from the beginning even to this day, confused it with therapy. NLP has a significant background in therapy. Add to this the fact that all of the original books and writings about NLP were written in the context of therapy and the examples and illustrations that were used were almost always from the field of therapy. Nevertheless, this was still a big confusion because NLP is not a therapy, not even a psychology.

Of course it makes sense that it took two men from outside the field of therapy to walk into that field and see things that those on the inside did not. Thomas Kunn (1972) wrote about this in his book, The Scientific Revolution. Those inside a paradigm often become paradigm blind and cannot see what is obvious to those on the outside. So when Bandler and then Grinder happened upon the “magic” of Perls and Satir, for a short while they had a distinct advantage.

Now against that background is another one, and one of far more importance for identifying what NLP is. I have been calling it “The Secret History of NLP.” This is the fact that Perls and Satir and Bateson were part of the Human Potential Movement and that means that the focus was on psychological health (self-actualization) rather than therapy. It was on Maslow’s idea of modeling the best and healthiest in human nature.

Imagine how things might have turned out for the field of NLP if that had been made the focus and the “therapy” context was made more peripheral. But they didn’t. In fact, one of the surprising things that I found from the time I began studying NLP is that throughout the early literature of NLP, both Bandler and Grinder refer to themselves as therapists! Of course, they were not. They might have been working with clients and taking on therapeutic issues, but neither was trained in therapeutic work and neither had any expertise as therapists or psychologists. As a side-note, later in the late 1990s, the name NLP was changed in several countries in Europe to NLPt — which stands for Neuro-Linguistic Psychotherapy.

An interesting comment from Bandler, Grinder, and Andreas comes from Frog into Princes, which was published in 1978. In the following quotation they seemed to have just gotten the idea of moving from traditional therapy to Self-Actualization Psychology although they didn’t have a name for that:

“We are very slowly tapering off teaching and doing therapy because there’s a presupposition common in the field of clinical psychology which we personally disagree with: that change is a remedial phenomenon. You find something that is wrong and you fix it. “There is an entirely different way to look at change, which we call the generative or enrichment approach. Instead of looking for what’s wrong and fixing it, it’s possibly simply to think of ways that your life could be enriched: ‘What would be fun to do, or interesting to be able to do?’ ‘What new capacities or abilities could I invent for myself?’ ‘How can I make things really groovy?’” (190) “The idea of generative change is really hard to sell to psychologists. … We are currently investigating what we call generative personality. We are finding people who are geniuses at things, finding out the sequence of unconscious programming that they use, and installing those sequences in other people to find out if having that unconscious program allows them to be able to do the task.” (191)

What is NLP? Many others confuse it with hypnosis or hypnotherapy. But again, that’s not what it is. That is just one of the sources of the original modeling and one of the applications. The “magic” that Milton Erickson was able to produce with his medical hypnosis led to a second communication model in NLP, the Milton Model. And with that discovery, it seemed that the original founders took a strange turn, one that brought many other confusions.

So what is NLP? It is a Communication Model. That’s what it is— a discovery of how people use words to inform themselves, map reality, and create their behaviors. Modeled from people who were excellent in their use of language, NLP used Transformational Grammar to generate the Meta-ModelfromPerlsandSatir. And as a set of communication tools, the NLP model provides a way for us to model human experiences. So, NLP is a modeling process. That’s how it began, accidently, and that is (and will be) how NLP will grow and develop. The founders called themselves modelers in that early literature of NLP. And if they had really focused on that, they might have turned to focus on business and if they had done that, the field of NLP could have possibly discovered the field of Coaching and would today own it. But they didn’t. It would be many years later before NLP applications for business would develop. That came in the 1980s, not the 70s.

The 1980s started out pretty well for the field of NLP, but it did not end that way. In fact, almost as soon as the 1980s began, the field began dividing into various divisions as both founders led the way by going their separate ways. By the end of the 80s, each was claiming to do “pure NLP” and essentially “dissing” the other. As the 80s others were creating their versions of NLP and creating separate “kingdoms.” What a sad development for such a dynamic field.

Now the 1980s actually began in a wonderful way with the publication of “Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Volume I” (1980) by Robert Dilts published by Meta Publications. Robert had been commissioned to write that book back in 1978 having written a document on strategies that impressed both Richard and John. And this book, along with Robert’s other original books on NLP, went a long way to establishing the credibility of NLP.

Many years later, Oakley Gordon wrote a two part article in Anchor Point, “What is NLP? A Brief History” (May and July 1995). In those articles, he wrote in part the following:

“‘Volume I’ implies a ‘Volume II’. The second volume was to present the modeling techniques of NLP, the processes by which the NLP developers modeled excellence in human behavior. The project was aborted, however, due to the dissolution of the community of NLP developers.” (p. 14, Anchor Point, July 1995).

And so the vision of a series of volumes on NLP came to an end immediately after the first one. No other volume in that series ever appeared. Many years later when I wrote NLP Going Meta (1997/ 2004) I contacted Meta Publications and asked Fred Tappa for permission to name it “NLP: Volume II.” He said the term was reserved for the next volume and that was 1997— 17 years later! At the time I thought Fred was holding onto hope; but looking back my guess is that it was a joke and I just didn’t get it(!) at that time. The very next year, 1981, the first law suit between Bandler and Grinder occurred and as McClendon noted in The Wild Days of NLP, “Bandler bought John out of the Society” of NLP (p. 117).

About this dissolution of the society (and the community to a great extent) the collaboration between the original developers came to an end. Gordon (1995) noted:

“While there was some degree of tracking each other’s innovations, the overall effect of the breakup of the original group was a diversification in the trajectories of NLP with a resulting blurring of its definition.” (p. 16) So in a way, the 1980s brought so many challenges to the field that in some ways it is really surprising that NLP survived the 80s. Now among the challenges to the field, one of the strangest was Grinder’s attack on the original formulations of NLP. In 1983 Grinder and DeLozier decide the whole field was wrongly oriented and formulated and so created a “New Code” to replace the old code of NLP. Grinder went on to argue against the focus on conscious awareness in NLP claiming the “unconscious mind” as more intelligent and less likely to error. So the idea of “running your own brain,” so central to NLP (as per Bandler’s 1985 book, Running Your Brain for a Change), was called into question.

1986: Bandler provided his own challenges to the field due to actions in his personal life. In the middle of the 1980s he was arrested, charged with an account of murder, and spent 120 days in county jail. That certainly didn’t do the field of NLP any good! Steve Andreas lead a defense fund for Richard and personally provided $60,000 to Richard for the trial. What happened? A young woman, Corine Christensen, was shot by a .357 magnum revolver, the only other persons in the house was Richard Bandler and James Marino, an admitted cocaine dealer and her boyfriend. Though it was Marino’s house and although they had been fighting, the district attorney decided that the evidence pointed to Richard than the drug dealer! Anyway this lasted from 1986 to 1988 and ended in the grand jury unable to decide, so the charge was dropped. But, of course, not without the trial hitting the headlines in many papers and journals— including a scathing review in Mother Jones magazine that you can still find on various websites.

Another Bandler lawsuit occurred sometime later (1988 or 1989) against Tony Robbins. That one was against Robbins because he was not certifying people as NLP Practitioners or Master Practitioners through The Society of NLP. Settled in 1990 out of court with Tony promising to “certify people through the Society and pay his $200 for each one certified in NLP,” he promptly stopped training “NLP” as such and invented a new name, NAC— Neural Associative Conditioning.

And so with that Richard Bandler essentially chased Robbins away from the field with the result that even to this day Anthony Robbins will not say the three letters, NLP, when he is on Larry King or other international television programs. Richard just chased away the greatest salesman he could have ever had!

Another conflict arose during my Master Practitioner training in San Diego, 1989. One of the trainer there was Tad James. He had been participating in the Bandler trainings, but this time was different. Apparently without informing Bandler, Tad had claim ownership of the Time-Lines model that Bandler had created and had filed a trademark for “time-line therapy” (which by the way was never registered). From the stories I heard from trainers who were there, Richard and Tad argued loudly about this and almost came to blows. So that ended their relationship. After that Tad introduced his many versions of New Age religions including Huna into his sect of NLP.

With all of this fragmentation, many new Associations were created throughout the 1980s, but by the end of the 1980s, there was no International Association or body to govern the field of NLP. Again, Oakley Gordon (1995) write in Anchor Point:

“There is no organization with the authority to pass judgment on the quality of the diverse NLP training programs currently being offered, or even to define what is, and what is not, NLP.” (p. 17) … For the field of NLP has no single voice, no universally agreed upon definition, no quality control over what is offered under its name. An outside entering these waters may encounter anything from the sublime to the ridiculous.” (p. 18)

On a very positive note, it was during the 1980s that NLP went global. It was introduced into England 1981 or 2; then to Europe in the early 1980s, NLP came to Hong Kong in 1982, and so it went. Men and women from around the world began showing up in Santa Cruz and other places in America where NLP was being taught and then taking it home to their own countries. When and by whom NLP was taken abroad is much of the story that I don’t know so if you do know specific details, do let me know.

So the decade that began so positively and that began to see the spread of NLP everywhere, a decade that began with so much hope ended in fragmentation, embarrassment, and conflict. It’s the way of many movements, perhaps most movements. And yet for a movement about positive psychology, human excellence, and all based on a cutting-edge communication model— the 1980s were really a challenging time for the field of NLP.

NLP’S “NEW AGE” CONFUSIONS

Not only has NLP long been confused with therapy, it has also for a long time been confused with the New Age movement and many of the way-out ideas involved in that. I don’t know when “The New Age” movement began. In the USA it seemed to have arisen during the 1960s as freedoms of various sorts were sought for and explored— during the Civil rights movement, Women’s Rights, etc.

It also seemed to have also been part and parcel of the Human Potential Movement (1962–1985) and eventually became part of the Trans-Personal Psychology (approximately 1965). Esalen played a big role in it as it served as the New Age Center where the wildest ideas could be explored and where “East and West spirituality” could mix and mingle in new forms.

What specifically is this “New Age” movement? What ideas determine and govern it? Well, that’s where things get pretty messy. It is almost a catch-all-term for anything outside of the mainstream thinking. Sometimes it involves thinking outside-the-box and imagining what could be such imaginative questions as the following:

What if we could send our thoughts through space without speaking, just thinking? What if we could move physical objects by our thoughts? What if we are reincarnated from a previous life? What if this is just one expression and we will be back? What if thinking creates reality without having to invent and innovate products?

Wild and crazy and imaginative ideas, right? And if we keep it as just that— some imaginative thinking for exploring—it keeps us playful and open. But once a person starts to believe in such things—well, then the self-validating and self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling nature of a belief kicks in and then a person will begin to “see” and “perceive” evidence of their belief— even when there is nothing in reality. That’s when all of this becomes a problem. Then imaginations take flight and they never come in for a landing! They continue to hoover in la-la-land.

The challenge here is how to maintain a realistic (and scientific mindset) of testing things, checking things out, demanding rigorous standards for “proof,” and staying open, playful, and imaginative. It is believing-while-being a skeptic until there’s external evidence that even an unbeliever has to acknowledge.

So a New Age Believer is just that— a believer in something, someone fully convinced about something and who also believes that he or she has “proof.” In this, a non-believer does not see or perceive what the believer does. This differentiates true science from pseudo-science. In legitimate science, the evidence stands on its own— there’s a process for testing, and it can be replicated by others, even by those who do not believe that something exists or that something works. In fact, when the non-believer has to agree with the facts and legitimacy of something, then you have proof that isn’t a function of a self-validating belief.

Now you know why double-blind and triple-blind research design projects are so important in science. If the persons conducting the study know what to look for or believe that they will find it, they will mess up the results.

Why is it that this comes so easily into NLP? Well the answer is this: As a cognitive-behavioral psychology based on a constructivist philosophy about reality and a phenomenological philosophy of human nature, we start from the assumption that there’s a difference between our mental maps about the world and the world. We start from this “the map is not the territory” distinction. We know that the way we “bring the world” into ourselves is through the “abstracting of our nervous system with its sense receptors.” This is what Alfred Korzybski described in great detail in Science and Sanity (1933, 1995). This is what NLP began with in saying that “We do not deal with reality (the territory) directly, but through our maps.”

(In Whispering in the Wind Grinder reveals that he has not read Korzybski as he accuses him of a shallow understanding of the “map” that we use to navigate reality and what Grinder calls ‘first access’ Korzybski mapped out in 1933 in much greater detail than Grinder as his Structural Differential and the neurological stages of abstractions.)

So far, so good. In science we know that the electro-magnetic spectrum of “energies”out there in the world are processed and interpreted by our nervous system and sense receptors as light, sound, and sensation. And we know that different nervous-system structures in neurology, as the eyes of owls, the ears of dogs, etc., see and hear and interpret the “energy signals” out there in the world differently from ours. They may see the ultra-violet aspect of the spectrum where for us, we see nothing and sense nothing. Then there are all of the extra-neural devices that we have invented over the years— devices that allow us to register, detect, recognize, interpret, and understand what is “out there” that we cannot pick up naturally with our neurological sense receptors.

And yes, there is a world “out there” beyond our nervous system. There is a reality of objects that impact us independent of whether we know what they are or how they work. You don’t have to believe in cars or car accidents (or disbelieve in them) in order to experience an accident. Reality exists outside of you and your inner “reality” (subjective experience of reality) is co- created by the mixture of your thoughts and beliefs with the stuff outside. So reality is not pure or only subjectivity. We do not merely project the world. We project our models and theories onto the world, our assumptions and then see the world in terms of those assumptions.

So we know that there is more “out there” than we can detect without special help. And this is where our playful imaginations come in as we imagine the what ifs… and play around in our thinking about what other extra-neural devices we could invent and wonder if we could re-program our thinking and feeling in order to expand our capacities. And as long as that’s what we’re doing, I say, go for it.

But I also think we should be very, very, very careful about turning imaginative ideas into beliefs, and then into creeds. I would love to move things only with my mind. But until someone figures out how to do that, demonstrates it to non-believers, and can demonstrate it under laboratory conditions, tele-kinesis is just an imaginary desire and sci-fi plaything, and not reality.

But this is what begins to create the New Age Believer— that person has jumped over the evidence stage and has become a believer, and often times a fanatic, who is absolutely convinced and therefore no longer open-minded and no longer open to feedback that he or she could be wrong. And that, of course, is a big danger sign!

NLP was designed, as a child of the Human Potential Movement, to be creative, playful, imaginative and to stretch forward to play with the various possibilities for developing new human resources. So no wonder so many “New Agers” were (and are) attracted to NLP and many end up as Trainers. And with that another problem begins. They not only teach and train the Cognitive-Behavioral psychology of NLP (if they even know it), but they also mix it with their religious belief system, alias their “New Age Religion.”

And they have the right to whatever religion they want! I have no problem with that. But to confuse NLP and New Age Religion, well, with that I do have a problem. They are fusing together a model of human nature with a set of beliefs. And doing that confuses things. Nor should someone confuse NLP wth Christianity, or NLP and Buddhism, or NLP and Isalm, etc.

We have been very, very careful in Neuro-Semantics about keeping the model of Neuro- Semantic-NLP clean and clear from any and every religion. Within our ranks are people who are believers in these different spiritual disciplines who use the models that govern language, emotion, meaning, performance, mental filters, etc. in their religious expressions. So far, so good. And what we ask is that they keep them separate. One is the model itself, the other are the various applications.

So if you see or read about some NLP or Neuro-Sematnic person into what I personally consider pure non-sense, like the stuff in “The Secret,” or other New Age Beliefs about tele-kinesis, channeling the dead, reincarnation, Huna (Tad James), “quantum” psychology or linguistics, “new humans” emerging with mutated DNA, etc., none of that has anything to do with NLP or Neuro- Semantics.

Now our official position in Neuro-Semantics is that all of this is pre-scientific and much of it is pseudo-scientific and is the idiosyncratic beliefs of certain people and have nothing to do with the models.

It is said that in the Inuit language, due to it existing in a context where people would frequently have to spend long periods of time in very close proximity together, for example in an igloo during ice storms, that many interesting distinctions emerged regarding human relationship.
Once of these was an indication that a person
"X...is a perfectly fine person, but I would rather not go seal hunting with him"

Wombaticus Rex wrote:Great talk but it's loose & conversational with poor sound, so summary attached.

Via: http://www.johnoverdurf.com/Meta_Pattern.mp3 (hosted mp3 stream)

John Overdurf on the core pattern of all NLP Processes

1) Associate the person to the problem. "Plug them in." Get them in their body, feeling the entire sensory spectrum of the problem or complaint. (He references "neuroscience" as a brain-computer metaphor, d'oh)

2) Associate the person from the problem state. "Get them out of it." No room for change without shifting their worldview out of the pessimism, self-fulfilling prophecy loops, toxic emotions.

Pauses to emphasize that problems in therapy/conversational change are rooted in #1 or #2.

3) Associate the person to their resource states. "Basically, any state that's better than this." Root through memories and sensory modalities to get there, work with them, elicit it from them. (NLP doesn't make you psychic like, say, DMT or LSD does.)

4) Associate resources to the problem state. "The logic here is that very thing that used to trigger the problem...will now trigger them into the state they want to be in." Emphasizes unconsciously...it's not going to be a matter of willpower or remembering. Needs to be automatic, just as automatic as the problem state.