I've studied NLP for a long time and I find it having resonance here. To the extent that it is used for self-help and the sheer resonance of how this discipline treats the minds thoughts like lines of code you can manipulate to get positive results.

This is a discipline recognizes that our thoughts and belief systems are similar to lines of code in programming. It teaches how to get to the core of your, and others’ programming style so that you can make just the right tweaks that will fix or enhance your actions or experience.

BOOKS:
Some books on NLP are watered down nonsense… anything by Richard Bandler and John Grinder is the hardcore, solid stuff. You can find them in any library.

The following is an example of how altering data of an experience can change how it makes you FEEL. Try it with good and bad experiences.

Think of an experience you’ve had in the past, nothing too bad. Play it from beginning to end and notice how it makes you FEEL. It should make you feel a little something, and if it doesn’t, just try and pick one that makes you “feel” a little! Don’t worry, it gets better! ;)

Then, play the same experience again, but this time play it in your head at a distance, as if from a far away screen, and note the difference in how it makes you FEEL. Remember, from beginning to end, build that tension.

Play that same movie with the brightness turned up. Notice the difference. Play it with the brightness turned down. Play it with clown music playing in the background. Play it in rewind, from end to beginning. Experience the newer versions from beginning to end and eventually you begin FEEL differently. You can use this to break down a traumatic experience or enhance a positive one.

That approach works for dealing with many ongoing fears as well.

Whatever ails you, it is always how you ARTICULATE and EXPRESS the data you receive and remember. For example, depressed people usually store their memories with the brightness turned down low. Knowing that, you have them brighten up the movies being played in their mind to an optimal level (different levels of brightness affect people differently) and voila! But really, they need to DO it, not just philosophize over it. You got to re experience it in that different way to FEEL the difference.

People with OCD, that wash their hands a hundred times… they’re just making choices based on a paragraph of mind data, in the same way a programmer can design a loop to iterate itself a hundred times. With NLP you can reprogram that!

One really cool feature of NLP is you can copy/paste the motivating data of successful people. You basically ask them a bunch of questions (extracting their lines of code) about how they receive and remember data that gets them motivated. Like, you ask, what their brightness level is, how close or far do they watch the movies that take place in their mind, the “tone of voice” they talk to themselves with in their mind, etc, and you get this neat data template to play with.

Imagine presenting a spiritually mature person with something you fear and getting the data for how he gets over it, so you can get over it.

NLP notes that people articulate and express the data they receive and remember in different ways the same way a programmer can write different lines of code and create the same effect. So, changing the brightness might work for some people, while playing it in rewind (from end to beginning) might work for others. See what works for you!

NLP…

It’s like, if you see a depressive painting of black and white ambiguous swirls, NLP could be the mental or physical brush of red paint, to where you color a red circle in the upper middle. It’s still ambiguous… but now, it “could” be a vanilla sundae with chocolate fudge and a cherry on top. Forget about the logical differences for a bit and notice how the difference makes you FEEL.

It’s like, in movies, and the movie editor needs to convey an emotion to the viewers. If the film crew did a bad or neutral job, it’s the editor’s job to rephrase or enhance the experience without re-filming the movie. Given specific, limited information, he can change emotive effects on audiences by cutting, splicing, blending, speeding, or slowing the film/information, among many other things…

It’s like, in programming and you’re looking at someone else’s code. It would be daunting to rewrite everything! Not to mention time and energy consuming. As a programmer myself, when I see a bug in someone’s code, I don’t rewrite the whole thing my way, I just tweak it. But I need to see and understand the “structure” of his data to do it. NLP gives you the tools to do that.

It’s like, in music, if you play a set of the following pitches: C-D-E-F-G-A-B, and you gravitate towards the pitch of A, the whole thing sounds tense or depressing (A-minor scale). If you gravitate towards the C in your playing, you get a happy, joyous, lighthearted melody (C-Major Scale).

Music, art, movies and minds can get a lot more complicated, those were just examples. But you see what I mean?

And sure, you could say it’s just changing perspective, NLP is the art and discipline of that from a computer science and psychology mindset. Check it out.

Look it up at least on WikiPedia if you go no further before making a major commitment to this approach. There is controversy associated with NLP. It most definitely is a made up term which is frequently pointed out and that there is no "Neuro" aspect to it. This is simply an implication of a non existent scientific background associated with it. It also has nothing to do with the discipline of linguistics. It does bear similarities to the pattern of practitioners selling courses for big bucks as in paying $1,000 for training in Transcendental Meditation which you can get from Tom's books and many other effectively free sources. The founders have definitely made big bucks from it.

Another pattern match that I see is that it involves habituation. By imagining situations over and over and with variations, the reaction to a trauma or a phobia becomes blunted by habituation.

Ted

... in the same sense that there is no "neuro"-aspect to the "neural networks" of computer science. They are computer programs meant to be run on machines. NLP is a collection of books and ideas, meant to be digested by people. Neurons are cells in the brain.

Offer me a term which is not "made up". Bandler readily admits he made it up in order to set it apart and be free of "contamination" from other sources, much like a trademark.

Like an exercise-scheme, yoga for example, it makes claims which are not easily tested scientifically. You have to try to see if it works. All forms of therapy share this, though NLP is not strictly a form of therapy.

One of the points of understanding where NLP and MBT is in agreement, is the view of subjective/objective experiences. The subjective experience is what matters, the objective reality is there to provide enough credibility for you to believe in it. Another point of agreement is that a placebo can be equally as effective as the medicine. It seems the medicine and the doctor are often there just to make the patient believe the medicine is going to be effective. With this in mind, why not optimise for the placebo-effect? NLP is essentially an effort to do that.
Not quite, but it might.

The original books by Bandler/Grindler contain many stories. I don't remember many details by they tell how they helped cure schizofrenic patients by various methods which worked instantly. One man insisted that he was jesus until they started to reenact the crucifixion around him, complete with a big wooden cross he was to carry out on the lawn on his shoulder.

Another patient saw imaginary snakes in bathrooms. The cure was to put real snakes together with plastic snakes in the bathroom and invite the patient in. He would then have to distinguish between the real snakes, the plastic snakes and the imaginary snakes. The brain was forced to distinguish then which gave the brain that option later to recognize the imaginary snakes.

I looked for these now but couldn't find them. They might come from some taped seminar.

The trick is this; when the brain has options ("decision space") it can choose. NLP can train the brain to have more options.

I think for someone that has embraced MBT, the original NLP books can seem insignificant or boring. It doesn't recognize OOB, larger reality, or anything such. On the other hand, it could be useful to be reminded how trivially the brain works.

Johan,

What about being reminded that the brain in the viewpoint of MBT does nothing. It is instead an artifact, if it can be accessed in some way, of the Virtual Reality. This is something that Tom has commented upon. It had to do with changes observed in the brain of primates that had experienced some kind of moral development as I remember and it was said that because of this experience some particular aspect of the brain configuration was enlarged. What Tom pointed out was that the brain configuration followed function as developed within the IUOC that performed as the mind of the primate as a conscious being.

The neural networks of computer science are in fact simulations of the neural networks of biological systems. To quote from WikiPedia: This seems like a perfectly legitimate usage of the term neural network. There is a real connection between the artificial and the natural neural network as the intent of creating them.

The argument regarding NLP in comparison is spurious in that it has nothing to do with neurons, real or artificial. As you stated, "Bandler readily admits he made it up in order to set it apart and be free of "contamination" from other sources, much like a trademark." There was an implication of some relationship that was not in existence between NLP and neuro science however and this is why the name is questioned as I understand it.

Ted

We agree on everything except the criticism of the name as a legitimate criticism of the theory/practice/field.
The same applies with NLP, the intent is to manipulate the natural neural networks by jogging them with various stimulus. Whether that is actually occurring shouldn't matter.

So this is basically Behavior Modification?
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

It might not be helpful to think of it, or anything like it, to be basically Something Else.

When learning japanese, are you basically learning new Pronunciations And Spellings for the words you know? Do literal translations between two languages really have the same meaning?

Much can get lost in literal translations, in general.

The valuable thing I got from NLP was not modification of behavior, but rather behaviour "decodification". I started to look for what is autonomous or involuntary and what is intentional. That in turn allowed me to detach a bit from the anxiety people get when interpreting intentions - most people are simply enacting autopilot programs and are as much victims of their behaviours as their surrounding is.

Learning a new language as a second language is learning new symbols for communicating, not changing behaviors. I do agree that having some understanding of why we behave in certain ways is useful to not having to consider oneself a victim in life but rather a participant instead. It's just data. Experience to process into new Knowledge.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

I've read a little on NLP recently. Apparently its pseudo-science. The theory is total bunk, completely made up, rather than having been derived from actual scientific data. NLP's practical applications have been tested, either the methods do not work or the methods do not seem to have an effect beyond placebo, according to credible scientific studies. NLP incorporates the power of suggestion, which does have an effect but it is a perfectly mundane effect which does not require extravagant unprovable theories to be explained; this is how NLP techniques can appear to work for some people.

A pertinent quote from wikipedia:

"NLP practitioners and academics Tosey and Mathison have argued that the experimental approach is not always appropriate for researching NLP, instead proposing that NLP should be researched phenomenologically. Gareth Roderique-Davies (2009) stated that "Phenomenological research is free from hypotheses, pre-conceptions and assumptions, and seeks to describe rather than explain. Given the claims made by proponents of NLP, this adds little to the credibility debate and would produce reports concerning the experience from the perspective of the individual rather than confirmation of the claimed efficacy. The fact remains that NLP proponents make specific claims about how NLP works and what it can do and this compels providing evidence to substantiate these claims." He argued that the proposal to conduct phenomenology research using NLP modeling "constitutes an admission that NLP does not have an evidence base and that NLP practitioners are seeking a post-hoc credibility."

Which is a weak argument as this is true for all forms of therapy, and necessarily so. It's a bit like criticising guitarists because it is impossible to prove that guitars improve music. All social sciences are psuedo sciences, btw. That's a blanket statement, so take it with a grain of salt.

The current instruments for correlating brain activity with psychological functionality are just too crude to be able to produce any conclusions. Until we can read true full-modality memories and feelings out of the brain-waves (and we won't ever), evidence will have to be subjective for all therapy.

The real lesson seems to be that, there are no safe authorities to rely on - whether religous books or fashionable acronyms. Anyone and their patient can be lying - the only thing that matters is whether it helps you.

I'm not sure how you are using the phrase 'pseudo science' but Tom as recently as in his Calgary workshop, points out social sciences compared to hard sciences are necessarily soft due to the uncertainty of the human consciousness of the subjects.

Consider the science of rocks, say, which has no uncertainty.

The social sciences are not pseudosciences, psychology may be a limited dicisipline and there may be silly ideas coming from that field of research but you can't hand wave psychology in defense of NLP. If psychology lacks credibility then NLP lacks credibility two fold.
I'm not sure what you mean in the above paragraph but NLP makes testable claims and such claims are therefore subject to the scientific method. If you choose to contend that NLP does not make testable claims then why should you or I take it seriously?
As to your first statement in this paragraph, science is an authority, so I do not agree when you argue that there are no authorities when it comes to human knowledge. As to your second point, I agree in principle, the proof is in the pudding but we must also defer to science. Human being are limited and have various cognitive biases. I have already pointed out that NLP can seem to work for some people because of the power of suggestion, the power of suggestion is real. However, there is no evidence for NLP's theory or its extravagant claims.

Certainly. But there is a wide gap between psychology and NLP in the weight of the claims. Most of the wordings I remember from Bandler's books were light-hearted and open-ended. From what I've gleaned of psychology, it is often used as an authority to make definitive claims about the nature and quality of people. "He is that. She has this, therefore she does that."

Bandler would take the stance "how can we know?" (because ultimately it isn't verifiable) and leave it open as to what could be done. Labeling states and conditions is something Bandler would oppose, as it in itself affects self image and behaviour.
I would guess that, depending on how the claims are phrased, they are not testable to an extent that would make a difference. Basically, the point of NLP is to sway cognitive bias. It is not meant to be trusted, rather to be used as a form of exercise as long as it works.

From the way it looks, the point of psychology is to provide an opaque volume of material from which psychologists and pharmacists may lend authority when they judge people and ordinate medications. Ofcourse, it may have different meanings to different people.
We should recognize that science is a method, and the authority comes from evidence gained from science. It can never be an authority over things which are untestable.

There are forms of human knowledge that may be untestable, for example artistic talent, and so on. Is it possible to test if an artwork is good before we show it to an audience? If the test has to include the audience, is it repeatable?
For NLP, there is no difference between "seeming to work" and "working as intended".

I would say rocks most definitely have uncertainty, just significantly less than a human. :)

(ex. try measuring a rock)

_________________
Mike