MISUNDERSTANDINGS

FROM THE NEUROSCIENCE

 

In preparation for my next work, Unconscious Thinking, I recently read, The
Neuropsychology of the Unconscious: Integrating Brain and Mind In
Psychotherapy (2015).  Written by a psychoanalyst, Efrat Ginot, she wrote a
book attempting to integrate psychoanalysis with the current trends in the
neuro-sciences.  It seems that she has several objectives in mind as she
wrote the book.  One was to update psychoanalysis and reframe some of the
doctrines of Sigmund Freud to make them more acceptable today.  I thought
she was creative and insightful in that.  Another objective was to integrate
some of the new things in psychotherapy such as reframing and narrative
therapy.  She mentioned a few things outside of traditional psychoanalysis.

 

There is also her attempt to use the neurosciences as the all-validating
source of everything she proposes.  But while doing that, she often fails to
distinguish some of her guesses with what the neurosciences have actually
discovered.  While I like what she did with her title by separating "brain"
and "mind," in the text itself, she did not separate them.  Most of the time
she wrote "brain/mind" thereby confusing the two.

 

Now as if confusing those two phenomena did not contribute enough confusion,
she constantly wrote that this or that anatomy of the brain would "think"
this, "conclude" that, "figure out" X, "understand" Y, etc.  For example,
"The amygdala mediates both cognitive appraisal of threats as well as
emotions of fear and rage."  Here the person cognitively appraises something
as a threat which then shows up as fear or rage, but she writes as if the
amygdala does it!  So where's the person?

 

That's like saying, "The engine drove us to Susie's house."  "The
transmission brought us to a standstill at the red light."  By confusing the
brain with the mind, this author writes as if she assumes that by knowing
the brain parts-thalamus, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, medial temporal
lobe, etc.-you then know what the person is thinking, concluding, believing,
etc.  But the brain is the hardware for the mind, and not the mind itself.
She writes: "The unconscious systems left to their own devices, they do not
'learn' from reality" (67).

 

Actually, it is the person who thinks, believes, learns, and appraises
meaning, not the brain.  Certainly it is true that when there's damage in
certain parts of the brain, we will not have the necessary neurological
resources to do certain things.  Damage to the Werke section leads to
various linguistic problems, aphasias.

 

Yet this author pictures things operating within the human person as if it
operates only by the neurology processes, and that it does not occur via
cognition or linguistics.  "Much of what the brain learns occurs without
awareness and without the help of the neocortex."  Actually it is not the
brain that does the learning, it is the mind-the person's mind.  It is the
person who has a brain that learns, the brain provides the neurological
basis for learning.

 

She quotes Bounomano, a neuro-scientist, "Much of what we learn is absorbed
unconsciously as a result of the brain's tendency to link concepts that
occur together." (2011, p. 183).  Here again the idea is that it is the
brain that does this, not the person.

 

In writing about the neurological basis of thinking, she writes that it is
within the lower brain nerve centers in the sub-cortical regions (e.g.,
brain stem, midbrain, basal ganglia, limbic system, cerebellum, thalamus,
hippocampus, amygdala) that thinking begins.  Yet this is where she confuses
the information processes of the brain with what a person does, namely,
thinks.

 

There are good sections in the book.  She writes that "The amygdala mediates
both cognitive appraisal of threats as well as emotions of fear and rage.
Affect and cognition always work together.   As determined by evolution, the
brain's default position is to learn, especially in the service of
adaptation and survival." (p. 24).  Well, not exactly, the brain processes
information and because we all learn different things and conclude different
things, the brain only provides the data, you and I interpret it and give it
meaning.

 

What seems today to be the new fad is to accredit "the neurosciences" as
substantiating just about anything we wish were true in the human mind and
personality.  All you have to do is quote some research from "the
neurosciences" and that seems to tidy up all questions about legitimacy.
But, of course, in truth, it does not.  What's often asserted is still just
the most current best hypothesis of the writer and give it another six
months and all of that may change.  It's always good to "test all things,
hold fast to that which is good."




 

 WHAT IS NLP ALL ABOUT?

 

There are lots and lots of pieces of NLP.  When you speak about NLP, you
could be speaking about one of two dozen things.  Some years ago a young man
told me, "I can't do NLP on myself."  To that statement, you could go in one
of dozens and dozens of directions.  So I asked,, "What part of NLP can you
not apply to yourself?"  It turned out to be matching a client, but not
merely any client, only those of a particular ethnic group.

 

Speak about NLP and you might be speaking about representation systems,
language, sensory awareness, sensory acuity, matching, mirroring, pacing,
anchoring, collapsing anchors, transderivational search, the Meta-Model, any
one of the linguistic distinctions, sub-modalities in any one of the VAK
systems, synesthesias, meta-programs, time-lines, modeling, strategies, and
on and on and on.

 

The bottom line-there are a lot of pieces or components that go into what we
call NLP.  Now the question of the title, "What is NLP all about?" is asking
for how do you tie all of them together?  Yet over the years, there's been
numerous answers:

Communication, linguistics, change, therapy, personal development,
psychology, hypnosis, modeling, new age, learning, etc.

 

Amazingly, whatever a person concludes "What it is all about" that then
becomes that person's definition of NLP.  It operates as his overall
classification.  Even the first NLP book's subtitle contribute to the
confusion, "A book about language and therapy." And even today, you will
find different trainers emphasizing these different aspects of NLP which
leads to the controversy over What is it really?

 

True enough, NLP arose from the field of therapy.  It emerged from studying
the language patterns of the therapeutic communications of Perls and Satir.
Yet NLP was never thought of or confused with, Gestalt Therapy or Family
Systems Therapy.  NLP also was built from many of the concepts in Cognitive
Psychology (Transformation Grammar, the TOTE model) and from Korzybski's
General Semantics, yet it is not and has never been confused with either of
these.

 

Now over the past 50 years, probably 90 percent of the field has come to
think of NLP as primarily a Communication Model.  This is the consistent
theme that you will find in books, manuals, videos, podcasts, etc.
Accordingly, all of the above components of NLP are positioned as an aspect
of communication, and they are or at least they can legitimately be framed
in that way.

 

In revising and updating the NLP practitioner course, I began seeing it in
terms of something more fundamental, namely, as a model of thinking and of
the mind.  After all, what was the most unique discovery of the founders?
It was that people think in five modes-they think visually as they make
pictures, they think auditorially as they hear sounds, they think
kinesthetically as they feel sensations, they also think in terms of smells
and tastes, and then they think linguistically as by using words for
thinking (the meta-representation system).

 

Now other psychologists had mentioned and used the sensory systems going all
the way back to Tichner, but no one had ever proposed that thinking goes to
how we represent the senses.  That put the power of communicating, changing,
therapy, creativity, etc. back to a much simpler mechanism, a mechanism
every person has access to.

 

The result?  For one thing it cut out thousands of years of trying to guess
what mind, consciousness, and personality is comprised of.  As Bateson noted
in his Introduction:

"Psychologists accepted all sorts of internal explanatory entities (ego,
anxiety, aggression, instinct, conflict, etc.) in a way reminiscent of
medieval psycho-theology. ... Psychiatrists dabbled in all these methods of
exlanation ... they created statistical samples of morbidity.  They wallowed
in internal and mythical entities, ids and archetypes." (The Structure of
Magic, p. ix)

 

The phenomena of re-presenting to ourselves in our minds what we see, hear,
feel, smell and taste on the outside and then code it in words as we
classify things, allowed NLP to create a model of the mind which opened up
the fields of change, communication, therapy, linguistics, etc.  Yet what
the founders failed to recognize, which was much more significant, was the
model of the mind or of thinking which they had discovered.

 

Today we know a lot about the brain and simultaneous we still know very
little about the mind.  But we know this-the mind thinks.  That's what it
does.  It represents, it edits, it perceives, it attends, it languages, it
draws conclusions, it values, it remembers, it imagines, it intends, and on
and on.  And in my opinion-that's what NLP is truly all about.  And when you
know that- it opens up everything else which the mind creates in human
experience-which is the whole world.  Additionally and most importantly, the
quality of your thinking is the quality of your life.

 

 

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