Much of Neuro-Linguistic Programming [NLP] operates on the cognitive level, i.e. by manipulating images, words, and feelings through an organized process. However, NLP also purports to utilize neurological approaches. According to Lee Lady, the neurological approaches go about changing the mind’s programming by confusing the nervous system in ways that the subject doesn’t directly connect to the subjective phenomena s/he wants changed.
He suggests that EMDR and some other approaches access the nervous system through the subject’s eye movements and also by presenting the subject with tactile sensations (on the face). The Callahan Five Minute Phobia Cure (now part of what Callahan is calling Thought Field Therapy) also uses light touches around the subject’s eyes. Anchoring processes, among others, use touches and eye movement as a means of ‘confusing’ the central nervous system.
The famous five and ten minute cures of NLP posit the notion that the central nervous system can be trained other than through redundancy and repetition. Under normal cognitive theory according to Baar, 1988, there is no question that the operant conditioning of Central Nervous System activity occurs. In fact, it is so ubiquitous a phenomenon that there seems to be no form of CNS activity [single-unit, evoked potential, or EEG] or part of the brain that is immune to it. The fact is that with biofeedback training one can gain voluntary control over essentially any population of neurons. Biofeedback, however suggests a conscious control over the retraining process.
Baar goes on to suggest that habituated or automatized processes do not disappear, but become part of a new mental context that will shape later conscious experience. Established presuppositions or those which have been conditioned, tend to become nonconscious. Whatever we believe with absolute certainty we tend to take for granted. We lose sight of the fact that alternatives to our stable presuppositions can be entertained. This is what allows coherence of personality over time. However, when these established presuppositions [beliefs] cause problems in living, the need for intervention become apparent.
Gilovich, in discussing these predispositions indicates the self-fulfilling prophecy nature of such thought and how it might create problems in living, with the example: “Behaving in an unfriendly and defensive manner because you think someone is hostile will generally produce the very hostility that was originally feared. However, he also points out how seemingly-fulfilled prophecies also influence interpersonal relations. Such expectancies refer to expectation that alter another person’s world, or limit another’s responses, in such a way that it is difficult or impossible for the expectations to be disconfirmed. Thus, the expectancy is confirmed, not by the person actively conforming to some expectancy, but by the target having little opportunity to disconfirm it. If someone thinks that I am unfriendly, for example, I might have little chance to correct that misconception because s/he may steer clear of me. The absence of friendliness on my part could then be construed as unfriendliness.
It is these types of self-confirming ideas that lead to problems in living and since they are housed in mental contexts which are nonconscious, the person may not even be aware of how s/he creates the circumstances of problem. It is within this context that traditional cognitive interventions take place.
Baar tells us that we can at times make a piece of nonconscious mental context consciously accessible, and change it. Consciousness, he suggests, is specifically used for ‘debugging’ nonconscious systems when new information requires it. We will not go into the process of such change here, but only point out that when we use cognitive interventions we try to help the subject person become aware and attend to nonconscious ‘leakage’ into the conscious world, have them analyze these thoughts for utility [the degree of pleasure/pain] they produce, create alternative thoughts that might be more utile and finally, to train the central nervous system through some type of repetition and redundancy to adopt the new thoughts. The new conceptual context then begins to shape the interpretation of observations.
Contexts are organized knowledge structures. This implies that they are internally consistent; they tend to resist change when it is inconsistent with context, and resist more strongly the deeper the inconsistency.
Metacognitive insight into contextual processes may be poor most of the time, unless the context is disrupted, so that it can become decontextualized and an object of consciousness in its own right. Conscious experiences, when they are adapted to, result in new contexts, which in turn, serve to constrain later conscious experiences. Remembering is not the re-extraction of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude toward the whole mass of organized past reactions or experiences. [Fredric Bartlett – as quoted by Sacks.] Thus we are always defining and redefining our reality by ‘getting used to’ new experiences, although this process, unless stimulated by psychological facilitation, tend to be rather gradual, except in highly stylized circumstances.
In these circumstances, Baar indicates that even a single conscious experience may trigger a short term change in context; or in the case of traumatic experiences the effects can last for years [italics added]. Thus, we know that the mind/central nervous system does evolve over time. Neurologist G Edelman theorizes that the evolutionary process takes place within each particular organism, and within its lifetime, by competition among cells, or selection of cells, or rather groups of cells, in the brain [Sacks].
Edelman discusses two kinds of selection in the evolution of the central nervous system; ‘developmental’ and ‘experimental’. The first takes place largely before birth. The genetic instructions in each organism provide general constraints for neural development, but they cannot specify the exact destination of each developing nerve cell, for these grow and die, migrate in great numbers and in entirely unpredictable ways; all of them are in Edelman’s terms, ‘gypsies’. Thus the vicissitudes of fetal development themselves produce in every brain unique patterns of neurons and neuronal groups [‘developmental selection’]. Even identical twins with identical genes will not have identical brains at birth; the fine details of cortical circuitry will be quite different. Such variability would be a catastrophe in virtually any mechanical or computational system, where exactness and reproducibility are of the essence, But in a system in which selection is central, the consequences are different, here variation and diversity are themselves of the essence.
In regards to expirmental evolution, the creature upon being born is thrown into the world, and exposed to a new form of selection based upon experience [‘experiential selection’]. The world encountered is not one of complete meaninglessness and pandemonium, for the infant shows selective attention and preferences from the start. These (innate) biases, Edelman calls ‘values’, are essential for adaptation and survival. These ‘values’ – drives, instincts, intentionalities – serve to weight experiences differently, to orient the organism toward survival and adaptation, to allow what Edelman calls ‘categorization on value’. … ‘values’ are experienced, internally, as feelings: without feeling there can be no human life.
It is up to the infant, to create his/her own categories and to use them to make sense of, to construct a world – and its not just a world that the infant constructs, but his/her own world, a world constituted from the first by personal meaning and reference . Thus the mental contexts defined by Baar are singularly unique constructs for each individual person, having created a unique neuronal pattern of connections. Experience acts upon this pattern, modifying it by selectively strengthening or weakening connections between neuronal groups, or creating entirely new connections. Thus experience itself is not passive, a matter of ‘impressions’ or ‘sense-data’, but active, and constructed by the organism from the start. Every perception is an act of creation.
The question of how to facilitate this evolution in positive ways for people who have problems in living, has so far been answered through cognitive interventions as described. However, NLPers insist that there is a great deal of evidence, albeit anecdotal, that suggests that the central nervous system can be trained subconsciously as well. Just how this occurs is not yet clear. Take the following description of an NLP technique supplied by Lee Lady as an example.
Have the subject think of a thought or image that makes him feel bad. Then give him the following instructions: “Make your right hand [or left one, for those few left-handed people whose eye accessing cues are “reverse”] stiff, like a karate chop, and hold it vertically on your right thigh, like a trap door that’s open over a black hole. Then think about the thing that makes you feel bad, take a very deep breath, and blow all those bad feelings into that black hole. And as soon as you’ve blown the feelings out, slam that trap door shut really hard against your thigh and immediately follow my fist with your eyes as I raise it up, so that you’re looking upwards to your right. And as soon as your gaze moves up there I’ll spread out my fingers as a signal for you to immediately take a deep breath. And then right away blow that breath out towards the horizon.”
Lady tells us that this all has to be done very quickly, so that just as the subject starts to settle into one state, you have jerked him/her into the next. It’s also important for the subject to slam his hand against his thigh reasonably hard. Then you repeat the process until the subject can’t get the bad feeling back any more – maybe four or five times.
This is a rather benign intervention. What happens if it doesn’t work? Probably nothing. So then maybe we should be giving it a try. What if it works? We don’t know why it works. Lady suggest that what you’re doing is retraining the nervous system by breaking the cause-effect between a certain thought (whether that thought is something you say to yourself or an image that comes into your mind) and the feeling that goes with it.
We need, to separate at this point, the experience and its outcome, from the explanation of the outcome. If, in fact, the experience has a utilitarian outcome, meaning increases pleasure in living and reduces the pain of living, then by all means we should probably use the technique. However, Lady’s suggestion that we are retraining the central nervous system nonconsciously is intriguing, but we can find nothing in the literature to suggest that it is true. This does not mean that it isn’t true, only that we cannot document its truth.