Magic in practice 2nd ed, p.12
Magic in Practice (2nd ed), page 12
Social psychologists have identified at least seven classes of priming.
Semantic priming, the most common form, uses words to create meaning that, in turn, influences later thoughts.
Conceptual priming uses ideas to activate a related response (‘shoe’, for example, may act as a prime for ‘foot’).
Perceptual priming describes the process whereby a fragment of an image is expanded to complete a more complex picture based on an image seen earlier.
Associative priming relies on ‘collocation’, the means whereby English words combine in predictable ways: ‘chalk’ and ‘cheese’, ‘bread’ and ‘butter’, ‘distinguished’ and ‘career’. Freudian free association is based on associative priming.
Non-associative semantic priming links concepts, but less closely than semantic or conceptual priming. ‘Orange’, for example, may act as a non-associative prime for ‘banana’ (both fruit).
Repetitive priming refers to the way reiteration influences later thinking. Advertising motifs and jingles exploit this effect.
Masked priming occurs when words or images are presented too rapidly to be recognized consciously. Becca Levy’s experiment, described above, is an example of masked priming.
Important points to remember:
Priming relies on stimuli that influence future thoughts and actions, even though they may not seem to be connected;
Priming increases the speed at which the primed subject responds or recognizes the stimulus; and
Priming can install new thoughts and behaviors, or make old patterns and behaviors more readily accessible, and therefore more likely to be utilized than older, less available, material.
EXERCISES
1. Look at the seven classes of priming above. Choose any four. For each chosen class of prime, write down a list of nine overtly positive priming words in context of your own work (for example, 12 words that prime for comfort or relax or heal).
2. Take a close look at your working environment or office. Look at every picture, object, icon, etc. How many are actually sending priming signals? Are they positive or negative primes?
3. Now go back to your lists from 1 above. How can you make these into, subtle covert primes that can be used in your own office or consulting room?
4. Go online and search for images representing the themes of your positive priming words. These can be used in a digital photo-frame placed obliquely to your patient, but within his peripheral vision. Set the images to change about once every three seconds.
Notes
111. Pert C (2006) Everything You Need to Know to Feel Good. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.
112. Levy BR (1996) Improving memory in old age through implicit self-stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71(6): 1092–107.
113. Levy BR, Hausdorff JM, Hencke R, Wei JY (2000) Reducing cardiovascular stress with positive self-stereotypes of ageing. Journal of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 55: 205–13.
114. Langer E, Dillon M, Kurtz R, Katz M (1998) Believing is Seeing. Harvard University, Department of Psychology.
115. Langer E (2009) Counter Clockwise Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. New York: Ballantine Books.
116. Ibid.
117. Reisberg D (2007) Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind, pp 255, 517.
118. Chartrand TL, Bargh JA (1996) Automatic activation of impression formation and memorization goals: Non-conscious goal priming reproduces effects of explicit task instructions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71(3): 464-478.
119. Social exclusion may make you feel cold. HealthNewsTrack, September 17, 2008, sourced from Association for Psychological Science – http://www.healthnewstrack.com/health-news-668.html
120. Bargh JA, Shalev Idit (2012) The Substitutability of Physical and Social Warmth in Daily Life. Emotion 12(1): 154–162.
6
Structure, Process and Change: the building blocks of experience
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.—Attributed to John Lennon
Exactly what constitutes the nature of ‘reality’ and the ‘meaning’ of life has preoccupied scientists, philosophers, and spiritual thinkers for much of our time on the planet. And even though you are unlikely to be consciously aware of the questions that inform almost every moment of your life, they are there, directing your emotions, needs, moods, desires, and behaviors: ‘What is happening to me?’ ‘Why do I feel this way?’ ‘What does it mean?’ ‘What should I do?’
At virtually every turn, and, often unconsciously, we ask questions and make decisions about our world and our place in it as we navigate through the complexity of daily living, based on the assumption that we understand, or can understand, what’s really ‘going on’.
For much of the time, this way of managing the world serves our needs. We eat, sleep, have sex, look to people and things we hope will give us something we call ‘happiness’. To many of us, the challenge seems to be to control the unruly, unpredictable, unreliable elements of life, thinking that somehow, some day, we’ll make it all fit. Sometimes it will seem to work; more often, it won’t.
Disappointment sets in, and we start all over again, trying to rearrange the pieces of an ever-changing puzzle. If it doesn’t, then we turn to an ‘expert’ in the particular part of our malfunctioning body-mind in the hope that she can help.
One of our problems as a species is that we use our superior ability to think, but seldom think about the way in which we think. Even less do we suspect that how we think directly affects our experience, happy or unhappy, functional or dysfunctional, sick or well.
This should not be confused either with New Age ‘positive thinking’ or the hunting down and challenging of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy’s ‘negative thinking patterns’. We are talking about the structure and process of thinking, believing and knowing—more epistemology and less psychology; more how and less why.
In order fully to understand what mainstream NLP means when it refers to ‘the structure of subjective experience’, try the following exercise:
Recall a pleasant experience from your past—perhaps a holiday, or a reunion with a loved one. Make sure it is a specific experience or event.
Now, ask yourself how you were thinking about the memory, how you remember what you were doing, and how you felt. Most people answer vaguely at first, ‘I just remember it was good’; ‘We had a good time’; ‘I was feeling great’.
Now, return to the memory and answer the following questions: How strongly can you re-create your good feelings by recalling the memory? Scale it from 1 (a little) to 10 (as if you were there right now).
Do you remember the experience as a picture? If so:
Is it in color or black and white?
Is it moving or still?
Is it near or far away?
Are you observing it as if on a screen, or through your own eyes?
Are there any sounds to the memory? If so, are they:
Loud or soft?
Words or music?
Internal self-talk?
What feelings or sensations are involved, if any?
Where are they located in your body?
Are they still or moving?
Do they feel warm or cool?
What other qualities do you notice? Think of all your senses: visual, auditory, kinesthetic (feeling), gustatory (taste), and olfactory (smell). Make a note of all these distinctions.
The experiment above demonstrates the following:
your memory was created out of sensory-rich information (that is, you needed to activate, albeit internally, your senses of sight, hearing, feeling, and touch, and, perhaps taste and smell. We call these sensory modalities);
by acting ‘as if’ you were there, you re-experienced some degree of feeling or emotion that corresponded with the feelings or emotions you experienced during the original scenario. This is what we call ‘state’—the sum total of the psychophysiological changes that take place when you remember, imagine, or experience a particular memory, behavior, or event;
your senses had certain qualities: color, size, movement, degree of involvement, volume, temperature, etc (we call these sub-modalities, because they are subsidiary qualities of your sensory modalities); and
you favored one sense over the others (we call this your sensory preference).
Additionally, even though you might have experienced strong feelings or emotions when recalling this experience, you also somehow ‘knew’ that you were ‘here’, remembering, and not actually back ‘there’.
A simple remembered incident from your past turns out to have a host of qualities that permits you to sort information, code it, and store it in a ‘filing system’ that allows you to distinguish one event from another, place it on an internal ‘time line’, and invest it with a unique emotional ‘charge’.
Now, try something else.
Imagine someone raking their fingernails down a blackboard (supposing you’re old enough to remember blackboards). What is your response?
Or, pretend you have a lemon in your hand. Feel the weight of it and the texture of the skin. See the color of the peel and the flesh in your mind’s eye. Hear the sound of the knife as you slice into it, and smell the pungent oil of the skin. Now bite into one half, and swill the juice around your mouth before swallowing it. Notice its sharpness, how it reacts with your taste buds and the enamel of your teeth.
If you did this vividly enough, you either winced at the sound of nails on the blackboard, or found your salivary glands going into overdrive. There is no real blackboard, no lemon. Just the power of your imagination; a part of your brain that is unable to distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary; a cascade of neurochemicals and a physical response.
The fact that people can activate physiological responses merely by imagining or remembering events will, as we will explain, serve an important function in the provision of healthcare (and contribute greatly to our own mental and physical health). By understanding more about how a patient ‘sets up’ and maintains his particular dysfunction, you will become more strategically positioned to develop practical interventions to empower him to move more systematically in the direction of self-regulation, health, and wellbeing.
One of the fundamental messages of NLP is: we act on our representation of the world, rather than on the world itself.
The original (and prescient) NLP model of cognition suggested that information gathered from the external world is filtered through our preferred sensory modalities, and then through the constraints of our neurology and our social and cultural conditioning. This contributes to the creation of the internal model of ‘reality’ by which we function. The degree to which data are filtered dictates how expanded or constrained the model—and, therefore, our experience—is.
Over recent years, we have gained a fuller idea of how the organs of perception work, thanks to developments in neuroscience, and the abiding curiosity of those scientists who keep inquiring into the mysteries of the ‘black box’ of consciousness.
Surprisingly, perhaps, perception (along with our ability to predict and plan) emerges from a cortical skin comprised of stacks of cells, each only six neurons deep. These stacks, known as cortical columns, are packed together and function in a complex, bi-directional relationship with each other. Each of your senses relies on cortical columns packed into different areas of the brain (vision in the occipital lobe at the back of the cortex; visualization in the central prefrontal area; hearing on either side of the temporal lobe; kinesthetics in the parietal lobe).
Whenever you experience something new, most powerfully as a child, information floods in from the brainstem, fountains up through the cortical stacks, creating the informational phenomenon known as ‘bottom-up’ processing. When unaffected by previous experience, this ‘pure’ consciousness is unlikely to be experienced by older children and adults, unless they practice some of the techniques of mindful awareness referred to elsewhere in this book (see Appendix A, pages 357 to 360).
As time passes and your databank of experience grows, this inflow of experience becomes subject to modification. As suggested by Bandler and Grinder, who referred to ‘neurological constraints’ (stored experiences, beliefs, cultural rules and injunctions, values, etc),121 information already held in the nervous system flows downwards (‘top-down’ processing). The collision of these two creates a synthesis of new and old—a kaleidoscope of experience and impressions. The way in which this synthesis resolves itself gives rise to what we have already referred to as ‘state’. State, in turn, directly impacts affect and behavior.
States are sometimes referred to as ‘neural networks’, ‘neural clusters’, or ‘neural pathways’. More colorful descriptions, such as ‘engrams’, ‘parts’, and ‘sub-personalities’122 are also sometimes applied, influenced, perhaps, by the way these behaviors often appear to function beyond the direct, conscious control of the host.
It has been suggested that states develop out of the brain’s tendency to simplify tasks, especially motor skills, but also behaviors, responses, and the feelings that arise out of these.
We all have states to facilitate many different ways of being in the world. When you enter your place of business, you also activate a specific ‘working state’. When you arrive home and are greeted by the kids, you step into your ‘domestic state’. Your states allow you to have various ways of being-in-the-world (strategies): for playing sports; dialing a cold call; making love; and eating in a restaurant. You probably also have states for worrying about the mortgage; fearing a tax audit; obsessing about an argument with your partner or spouse; and hanging out with your friends.
We usually define state as ‘the sum total of the psychophysiological changes that take place when you remember, imagine, or experience a particular memory, behavior or event’, or, ‘the integrated sum of mental, physical, and emotional conditions from which the subject is acting’.
Even more significant, though, are two qualities of states:
Many of them function independently of other feelings and behaviors (we speak about them having defined ‘boundary conditions’);
Once activated, the feelings, emotions, and/or behaviors coded into that particular state will tend to ‘run’, unless the pattern is somehow interrupted or replaced.
‘Reality’, then, is a construct of our neurology, in much the same way as ‘vision’ is an interpretation by the brain, rather than a literal reflection of the external world. It follows, therefore, that at best the map can only approximate the world or ‘territory’ it represents, not least because the territory is too complex to render in exact detail, and our maps, made up as they are from selective data uniquely filtered through personal sensory bias, differ to some extent or other from those of the people around us.
However, when we create an internal representation of the ‘outside’ world, we seldom question the accuracy or validity of that representation, or notice the differences between the maps of the people we meet.
Alfred Korzybski, the founder of the field of General Semantics, made the now-famous observation, ‘The map is not the territory’, and attributed what he called ‘un-sanity’ to the fact that we often fail to distinguish between the two.123
Acquiring access to the patient’s map to ascertain how her representation limits his world is one of the first skills the effective practitioner should acquire. The patient is unlikely to have conscious access to her internal processing, but information nevertheless ‘leaks’ in a number of ways, both verbal and non-verbal.
To gain insight into the patient’s situation, we need to identify her sensory preferences, how she codes the ‘meaning’ of her experience, and how she creates and maintains negative feelings and repetitive behaviors. With that information in hand, it becomes relatively easy to interrupt and change her experience by changing the structure that supports it.
The information that follows is generalized, and it is important to remember that some people may display idiosyncratic patterns. Observe carefully before making assumptions.
Decoding the patient’s inner experience
The speaker may reveal his or her sensory preference (or the pattern of the current experience) in one or other of the following ways:
eye moments (‘eye accessing cues’) may be related to how information is stored in the brain and to innervation of the eye by four cranial nerves;
choice of words, also known as ‘sensory predicates’;
position and movement of the body; and
tone, rate, and pitch of speech.
Eye movements
The classic NLP model suggests that most right-handed people look to the left when remembering events, and to the right when creating new images (Figure 6.1).
Visual processing is suggested when the subject looks upwards, to the left, right, or directly ahead, the vision slightly defocused.
Auditory access is indicated when the eyes are in the midline, more or less in line with the ears. The head is often tilted to one side, or it may be turned so that the listener’s dominant ear is nearest the speaker.
Self-talk (also known as ‘auditory digital’) is often indicated when the speaker looks down and to his left.
Internal kinesthetics (feelings/emotions) may be present when the subject looks down and to the right. It should be noted that olfactory and gustatory processing are usually included within the kinesthetic categorization.
Figure 6.1 Eye accessing cues of a right-handed person. (© Dr Richard Bandler. Reproduced by permission.)
