From: wilkman@med.unc.edu (Alice Wilkman)
Subject: Re: NLP and what the .... are we talking about???
Keywords: NLP  NeuroLinguistic Programming
Organization: UNC-CH School of Medicine
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 03:20:24 GMT

In article <1992Oct2.075045.27760@news.Hawaii.Edu>
lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady) writes:

>As an example of models which are not -- in my opinion -- useful, I'd
>like to mention the NLP technique called metaphor.  This simply means
>that sometimes telling a subject a story can help them make a desired
>change, even though the story has no apparent relation to their problem.
>Most NLPers believe this can often work.  Milton Erickson used to do it a
>lot.  

Not just Milton Erickson.  Metaphor, in the sense that it is 
used in NLP, i.e., a story meant to engage the listener in 
such a way that change in the listener's beliefs and/or 
behavior takes place, has been used for as long as people 
have been communicating with language (Sure, before 
language was written we have know way of knowing, I know 
that, I'm guessing).  :-)  Storytelling for change certainly 
has a long history of use, whether that establishes 
usefulness or efficacy is another matter.

>I've heard two totally different explanations as to why this works.  The
>first is that story-telling by-passes the conscious mind and thereby
>by-passes resistance.  The second explanation, which Leslie Cameron
>Bandler offered us in a training several years ago, is that beliefs arise
>from compelling reference experiences.  And that a vicarious experience
>-- something one sees happen to a friend or on a television program or a
>story a therapist tells one -- can have just as much impact as an
>experience one goes through personally.  

These are, as you note, explanations ("reasons" why it works) 
not models in the NLP sense of the specific steps or 
components of how someone does something that allow another 
person to learn to do the same thing skillfully.  That kind 
of model is testable, in my opinion.  If Jones does x,y and 
z and gets a. And I do x,y and z, I either get a or not.

>So here are two models, if you will.  And I don't know of anything in NLP
>that enables one to decide between these two models.  And it doesn't seem
>to me that either model is especially useful.  These are simply 
>a postiori explanations for an observed phenomena -- that sometimes it
>seems useful for a therapist to deliver a message in the guise of a
>narrative.  

We are nowhere close to understanding in a "scientific way" 
why this appears often to work.  Just as we are nowhere 
close to *really* understanding how it works on a 
cellular or biochemical level.  Of course you are entitled 
to feel that the explanations offered are not useful to you.  
Others could come up with other explanations, some more to 
your liking, perhaps, or not.  The explanation doesn't 
effect the working any more than the idea that the universe 
revolved around the earth made that so.  

However, experiments could be devised wherein people with 
similar problems could be subjected to 1) conventional 
psychotherapies of defined natures or 2) NLP-style 
metaphors.  This, although not meeting everyone's definition 
of scientific, could provide useful information for 
therapists in their choices of the tools to use with clients 
to produce wanted changes most effectively (or at all).

>I think that most people with a scientific turn of mind find it a
>little unsatisfactory to simply know that something works but to not
>know why it works.  It seems only reasonable that the better one
>understands what makes something work, the better the chance of making
>it work even more effectively.

Noam Chomsky spoke here on campus a few months ago.  He gave 
two public lectures, one in his role as political activist, 
for which, although I missed it, I am told there was 
standing room only.  The second was on linguistics and its 
role in elucidating the human condition.  That lecture was 
given in the same hall which has seating for about 1500, so 
it would be an exaggeration to say that I had a choice of 
thousands of seats but a choice of hundreds does not convey 
fairly the difference in attendance. I digress, however, it 
does show the relative interest people have in these two areas.

He made the intriguing statement that scientists are largely
studying, in his opinion as I understood him, the wrong 
things.  That instead of studying things that are hard for 
people to do; it would be more enlightening to study the 
things that are easy for people to do.  And he gave as two 
examples of those things that are easy - learning a language 
as a child at a time when the child has none and seeing 
optical illusions.  Two things that virtually everyone with 
relatively normal endowments does with ease.
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