I wrapped up my NLP Master’s class over the weekend (2007-11-17). The class taught me a lot and has given me some really neat tools I’m beginning to put to work now. But during our discussion the topic of people abilities to do construct came up. I’ll have to explain what NLP means when we talk about construct but the basis position taken by my instructor and I guess some of the other researchers who built and continue to maintain construct is that we have been and continue to lose our ability to do construct in our minds. Before going any further I need to explain what I’m talking about.
NLP models the sense and splits up experience in to them. The big ones are Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic. In each of those areas you have recall and construct. If I ask you what color your car is you will (or should) go in to visual recall. If I ask you what you think an alien should look like you should go in to visual construct (or freak people out by going in to visual recall). When we are reading stories we tend to do a lot of visual construct (you’ve seen aliens on TV or movies so it probably isn’t the greatest example).
The theory from some of the NLP researcher type, if we label them as such, is that humans lost the ability to do kinesthetic constructor a very long time ago. Kinesthetic contains things like feelings and physical actions. The easiest example I can think of is how would you feel seeing a puppy hit by a car? Or how would it feel (sensations in the body) to drift a motorcycle through a turn with the rear tire spun up and the rear end coming around causing the front end to point deeper toward the exit?
The go further to posit that we’ve lost the ability to do auditory construct. In this case the loss has occurred in our near past. This would be the ability of a composer to hear the music he is composing without anybody actually playing. Be able to read the notes on a page and be able to tell how it will sound. I’m not a strongly auditory person, it isn’t a channel I exercise and grow much so at the moment I cant really think of other example. But I know of mechanics who can tell whether an engine is running right just by the sound of the exhaust, this maybe auditory recall, but I’ve seen it done with engines or vehicles never before encountered so at a minimum they are able to synthesize new sounds based on old experience.
Finally and from their perspective they think we are losing the ability to do visual construct. And this is where I throw down the bullshit card on the entire thread of thinking. The specific reason the card is pulled is the reason why they believe it is being lost: the progress of technology. We, meaning my generation (gen X) and our children spend some much time engaged with computers or technological devices that we must be losing something. I’ll agree that we are changing, but loss is in the eye of the beholder.
The loss of credibility here is that it sounds too much like the bullshit spewed out by older generations when talking about the newer generation. We don’t respect them enough, we’re lazy and shiftless, our music is too loud and makes no sense, etc, etc, et nausem make me puke right where I stand.
Here’s the problem from my perspective and why I’m not convinced: NLP is at the very most generous a soft science (and I am being extremely generous using the word science, but it is a study). It has no mathematical grounding like say chemistry. I’d love to call computer science a science but its really engineering for mathematicians. Because NLP draws on psychology it really pulls on statistics which is not really math. You can’t really make good predictions with statistics because you’re always going to be wrong sometimes. With math it either works or doesn’t. You can’t predict what I’m going to do from moment to moment. You can make an accurate guess but at the end of the day it is only a guess. Next – even with what we have scientifically – we still don’t know how the brain really works. We really don’t know what is going on inside people’s minds. NLP does its very best to model it based on asking questions and observing subjects, but it is very difficult to do and at the end of the day modeling is an art.
The final piece is – they’ve not modeled every single person so how do they know? 1 instance breaks the theory. You simply need to find one person who does kinesthetic construct and you’ve blown a hole in the whole thread. I believe I do kinesthetic construct which is why I tend to black myself out when I start reading about various medical things. I feel it. It isn’t a phobia or some other traumatic thing. It’s my imagination building up what it would (ah ***) feel like having that needle driven through my skin into my bone in order to sample my bone marrow. It doesn’t feel good and I really don’t like it. I’ve tried various swishes and tried rewriting personal history. The ability is simply there, its something my mind does. I can also imagine what it is going to feel like when I make a motorcycle drift through a corner as I described above.
This is the thing – my grand parents thought all you hippies where going to destroy the country and leave it in ruins. Bunch of free lovin, pot smoking, anti-war, tree hugging, communist sympathizing, granola eating, rock and roll listening hippies – going to ruin it all. You didn’t. Either you guys really suck and failed or they were wrong. I’m going to go with they were wrong. The world changed and it’s changing again. So why does this change scare you guys? Why is it necessary to believe the next generation is less than you are? What do you get from that belief and does it make it easier to get through the day? Everybody is entitled to their bias, but be careful of the maps it draws you they won’t take you where you want to go.