Tagged Posts: Psychology
Just got around to reading Blink. It’s a quick read – as usual with Gladwell the book’s central theme, the human ability to make almost instant decisions based on the unconscious mind and previously-acquired experience, is presented lucidly and with plenty of examples.
He structures the book in three broad areas:
- Evidence of human ability to make accurate decisions very quickly – faster than conscious thought
- The strengths and weaknesses this gives us
- Ways to develop skill and improve the accuracy of your instant impressions
Although Gladwell includes notes on sources, my frustration with books like this is that they only present one side of the argument, in favour of the core theory, and don’t really explore what else may be going on. However as an entertainment with a basis in science it’s a fun way to spend a couple of hours, and a good source of anecdotes to recycle in a “did you know” sort of way.
Technorati Tags: Books, Malcolm-Gladwell, Psychology
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2006-02-22
Technorati Tags: Psychology
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to join an evening of Dialogue co-hosted by Johnnie Moore, Alok Singh and Mark Hodge.
I’ve played a little with dialogue a few years ago as part of a (now defunct) group that was looking at how a group of independent professionals could develop a self-sustaining, learning, network – we had a few good results but the group dissolved. So I was very pleased to get the invite to “Common Sense – an invite to join a group dialogue into the possibilities for deeper connections within a group”.
In this short account I’ll try to give a sense of how the evening went, at least from a personal perspective, with a few thoughts about the flow, how to increase the chances of it happening again and some questions.
The experience
Ten of us gathered at the venue – an alternative business space called The Hub in Islington. This was slightly out-of-comfort zone stuff for me, but it rapidly became apparent that no-one knew everyone – for all of us at least some of the group were strangers. After some initial ice-breaking we sat in a rough circle of chairs…. and began to talk. Inevitably a little bit about the possibilities for groups to connect deeply to make things happen, but soon the conversation began to have a life of its own.
At first I felt a little self-conscious (others reflected back that they had similar feelings), but (reflecting from afterwards) it was clear that within about 20-30 minutes I was beginning to lose awareness of myself and become absorbed into the talk. It was from about this time that the group began to have long silences in between conversational exchanges. During the silences (which felt quite comfortable to me) I began to be aware of some of the feelings that I associate with being in a state of light trance, i.e. a sense of relaxation, reduced pulse and breathing, a feeling of being happy to follow the group wherever it went, combined with a feeling that if I had wanted to act in some particular direction I could have done so. Unlike trance there was no feeling of drowsiness – rather at those moments the sensation was one of awareness and concentration without effort.
These moments were fleeting, and within a few minutes we would be back into a flow of conversation – and to me these conversational interludes immediately after the deep silences often felt very much “in the head” as opposed to the grounded bodily feeling of the silences. However as the conversation went on, the silences became deeper and, almost at the end, there was a sense, hardly more than a fleeting glance, of the trance-like feeling carrying over into the conversation and suddenly it was as if we were dancing a piece we all knew. The nearest sensation I can describe where I have felt this before was many (many!) years ago when I used to do a lot of cycling, when occasionally a small group out on a ride would fall into a pattern of “through and off” without any kind of instruction, and with concentration keep it going for several miles.
And then it was the end. And something left the room, some energy suddenly wasn’t there.
In our final conversation, as people made their individual exits, I noticed, and commented, that I felt energised and refreshed. Although nearly two-and-a-half hours of intense listening and concentration had passed since I’d arrived, slightly late, somewhat frazzled by a rush-hour journey across London at the end of a full working day, I felt more awake at the end of the session than at the beginning.
Pre-framing
Clearly there were a number of factors that contributed to the success of the evening. Not least of these, in my opinion, was that we were a self-selecting group who by the very fact of being there had an interest in experimentation, probable prior experience in working in ad-hoc groups and an interest in Dialogue. Secondly, the invitation had pointed us at three specific pieces of reading: the original David Bohm Proposal On Dialogue, Alok’s own paper on The Group Unconscious and The Conditions for Thriving Conversations by Kathia and Alexander Laszlo.
Some questions
I think many of us would want to repeat the experiment. Some of the questions that go through my mind in regards to this:
- How quickly could we start creating the group trance / dance next time?
- What difference would it make if the group membership were a little bit (or a lot) different?
- What else could we do to encourage the rapid forming of group flow?
Technorati Tags: action_learning, action_research, collective_intelligence, david_bohm, Dialogue, Facilitation, group_facilitation, Psychology, trance
Time Lines
Where’s your future?
Where’s your past?
Puzzled?
Let me re-phrase that.
Think of something mundane that is going to happen tomorrow – perhaps brushing your teeth in the morning. Notice where you represent that idea, in the space around or inside you. Think now of something a little further into the future – next week perhaps – and notice where that is.
Repeat for a couple of other things, perhaps your next birthday or Christmas.
Now think about the past – an event yesterday, last week, last year, earlier in your life. Notice where in the space around or inside you that you think of those things.
Imagine now a line that joins up all of those points – from your furthest past memory through the current moment and on into the future. In NLP that imaginary line is called your time line, a metaphor that is used in a great many forms of powerful personal changework. For the moment just notice where the current moment is – specifically is it inside or outside your body?
Metaphors of Time
All languages use space or position as a metaphor for time. The idea that the metaphors we use are closely bound to the way we structure our thoughts was first expressed a quarter of a century ago by Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. Inspired by Lakoff and Johnson the early developers of NLP began to create the time line model.
Many processes have been developed that use the metaphor of Time As A Line to change the way people think about the past, the present and the future. Metaphor is a meta-stating process (i.e. a thought about a thought) so immediately adds a level of [bliki]disassociation[/bliki], a powerful tool to allow people to think about challenging events in their lives without being swamped in feelings.
As a coach I find that talking people through an exploration of how they think about life using the metaphor of a time line to guide reflection, re-consider past events or rehearse alternative futures is a very powerful conversational intervention.
In-Time and Through-Time
Remember I asked you to pay particular attention to where you represented your sense of the current moment? Lakoff and Johnson observed that in Indo-European language-speakers there is approximately a 50-50 split between people who think of the current moment as being inside their body and people who think of the current moment as being outside their body, usually just in front of them. NLP labels these two most common representations of the passage of time as [bliki]In Time[/bliki] and [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] respectively.
A lot of changework processes use manipulation of these mental models as a way of accessing new ways of thinking. For example how good are you at future planning? If you feel that you could do better then try imagining future events in a more [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] way i.e. mapped out in front of you as if on a wallchart or planner and see what difference that makes. Many people find a positive difference from this sort of work, but nearly everyone expresses some inner tension or discomfort when they first try to think of time in a different way – these models go right to the core of our way of being in the world and change can have significant effects on the way we perceive things.
The Connection Between Language and Thought
Further work by Lakoff and Johnson, and many others in the field of cognitive linguistics, has extended the thinking – for example this study.
New research shows that the metaphor which is used could depend on the native language of the person concerned. Laura Spinney, in the Guardian article How Time Flies [via Tom Coates] reports on research by Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser with the Aymara people from the Chilean Andes. There’s more detail in this presentation from Vyv Evans at the University of Sussex which summarises the field and has a long list of references to follow.
The Aymara study is the first documented research finding evidence of a group of people with a reversed sense of time. When talking about long time spans the Aymara seem to have a [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] model, when talking about shorter periods (up to several generations) they seem to exhibit a reversed [bliki]In Time[/bliki] model, with the past in front and the future behind:
When they talked about very wide time spans, their gestures indicated that they conceived of it spanning from left to right, excluding themselves. But when they talked about shorter spans, several generations say, the axis was front-back, with them at point zero. The gestures of the old man and the woman discussing their grandparents confirmed that they really did think of the past as in front of them.
This particular and (so far) unique way of modelling time seems intimately associated with the Aymara language:
In 1975, Andrew Miracle and Juan de Dios Yapita Moya, both at the University of Florida, observed that q”ipüru , the Aymara word for tomorrow, combines q”ipa and uru , the word for day, to produce a literal meaning of “some day behind one’s back
[...]
Aymara marks whether the speaker saw the action happen or not: “Yesterday my mother cooked potatoes (but I did not see her do it).”
If these markers are left out, the speaker is regarded as boastful or a liar. Thirty years ago, Miracle and Yapita pointed to the often incredulous responses of Aymara to some written texts: “‘Columbus discovered America’ – was the author actually there?” In a language so reliant on the eyewitness, it is not surprising that the speaker metaphorically faces what has already been seen: the past.
From an NLP approach we might predict some consequences from this model – in particular we might speculate that the Aymara would not have a well-developed sense of future planning because the future is literally behind them – this seems to be born out by Miracle and Yapita’s observation of the “great patience” of the Aymara. (The Aymara Language and Its Social and Cultural Context)
Making Time Work For You
So how do you think about time?
What happens if you move those representations around?
Play with your timeline and see what happens…
Technorati Tags: Coaching, NLP, Psychology
New on the blogroll is The “Does it Work?” Diary from my friend Clare Walker.
She’s taken on the challenge of documenting “Which personal development techniques actually work”, and amongst other things is documenting a self-experiment on the positive affect on mood obtained by abstaining from watching television news.
She says:
I’m not certain why this may work, but suspect that:
1) The bias of most news is depressing (eg an emphasis on crime, disaster, problems, etc)….(And yes, I know that the media can do tremendous good by highlighting poverty, disasters and destruction, but if in the end we’re all too depressed to respond, that isn’t, in fact very useful).
2) Most of this is illustrated with pictures (which people’s unconscious minds just lap up).
3) Watching television is known to induce an alpha-brain-wave, trance-like state
(the very same state in which it’s also easiest to create positive emotional change too).
4) I watch most TV news at night…which is also the time I think of for both myself and my students as being the most powerful for personal development and changework. (Something to do perhaps with tiredness after the day inducing that all-important alpha brain-wave state again.
Try it for yourself!
Updated link to Clare’s new location at http://www.selfworks.net/blog/doesitworkdiary/
Technorati Tags: Meta_Blogging, Psychology
Joe Ely writes about Lean Manufacturing Systems. One of the core tenets of Lean is to gather frequent feedback about the difference between what you planned to do and what you actually did, reflect on the difference and do something about it. The key thing is doing something about it. Today he tells a story about the importance of knowing what is wanted before you can take action.
This reminded me strongly of the concept of well-formed outcomes – one of the foundation stones of NLP. I find that often one of the most powerful coaching interventions is simply helping someone gain a clear view of what they want to happen and the nature of the first few steps. Something very powerful gets triggered in the unconscious mind by a clear view of what you want and many people report that change begins to happen shortly afterwards.
Technorati Tags: Coaching, NLP, Psychology, Systems
At the suggestion of Marc Eisenstadt I’ve been trying Compendium.
The tool itself seems relatively straightforward (I have used both cognitive mapping and mind map software before so this may not be a fair assessment of how a beginner would get on) – the trick I suspect is in learning a methodical approach to applying it to a specific task.
I experimented trying to map out the exchange of views in the recent “Hierarchy” exchange (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) [order may not be quite right] between Dave Rogers , Jon Husband and Euan Semple but ran out of steam partway through analysing the second post. I don’t think that is a comment about Compendium, more a facet of the difficulty of mapping this sort of writing especially when you are very rusty at that sort of thing.
This will be the problem with creating the semantic web, it’s completely conceivable to have nice well-formed RDF triples as a way of navigating information that is already structured but the vast majority of human knowledge is tied up in messy human-written text.
My gut feeling is that most of us, most of the time, don’t analyse information to the depth that is needed to make good use of a tool such as Compendium. Certainly my tendency is for a strong degree of pragmatism in my learning – I’d suggest that generally knowledge-workers dig just enough to get a sufficient gist of things for the immediate purpose – as long as I have good enough knowledge for the task in hand then why seek more precision?
The willingness to stop digging could be increased by the illusion of explanatory depth. This tendency for people to over-estimate their knowledge of a subject where there are attractive intuitive explanations was identified in 2002 by Frank Keil and Leonid Rozenblit. I’m probably doing it now of course!
The next area to try Compendium will be working the other way – assembling a set of facts or assumptions about the world and seeing if it helps extrapolate meaningful abstractions. The obvious application of this will be in strategy development.
Wiki page for evaluation notes: [wiki]Compendium[/wiki]
Technorati Tags: Knowledge_Management, Minds, Psychology
Johnnie Moore is thinking about changing mental models , in particular how to ensure that group work really does take advantage of the collective intelligence of the group rather than falling back to s simple comparison or accumulation of everyone’s individual world view.
This reminded me of the work published by Chris Argyris, Peter Senge and others on the [bliki]LadderOfInference[/bliki] . I wonder how we could encapsulate this thinking into the world of the blog?
Technorati Tags: collective_intelligence, Knowledge_Management, Learning_Organisations, Psychology
Ming links to this article about research into “Hypertasking” which suggests that although frantic multi-tasking (with the help of phones, IM, email, feeds, etc., etc., etc.) has the appearance of productivity the reality is of significantly reduced performance on the individual cognitive tasks. This is not the first study to suggest that multi-tasking makes you perform less well – for example this, this and this.
In the comments to Ming’s post there are a range of views expressed but two themes emerge:
* using the tools available today to _filter_ incoming information and tasks, allowing you to concentrate on the important things
* there is indeed a very sharp limit to the power of conscious processing to handle multiple tasks (Miller’s [bliki]SevenPlusOrMinusTwo[/bliki]) but the unconscious mind is capable of many many simultaneous activities.
From my own subjective experience I would suggest that one reason why having too many things to do “simultaneously” hits productivity is because it ignores the way the mind transfers things into unconscious processing.
The trick seems to be to concentrate on one thing sufficiently long that you build up a whole set of pathways relating to it, then “put it down” and move on to something else – the unconscious will still be working away. Do this and you will be surprised how often the answer “just appears” a few hours or days later.
Time-slicing too finely in the conscious domain seems to have the effect that no topic creates enough energy to engage the unconscious learning circuits, so I’m left relying on the distractable power of the conscious alone.
It would be interesting to explore the neuroscience of this a bit further…
From a [bliki]TheoryOfConstraints[/bliki] perspective it would appear that conscious attention is the constraint, so useful questions to consider might be:
* How do I get the most out of my conscious processing power?
* What else do I have to change to allow my conscious attention to work at its best?
* How can I find other ways of processing information (e.g. exploiting my unconscious mind)?
Technorati Tags: Constraints, Minds, Psychology
Amy Gahran writes about the power of context – How Arranging Ideas Spawns New Ideas – to stimulate new thoughts around a subject:
No idea exists in a vacuum. It is connected to related ideas, and to the real world, and to other people’s perspectives. Those connecting threads of context are where the vast creative potential of the human mind lies. cite=”http://blog.contentious.com/archives/000288.html”
The idea that the mind works associatively is pretty well established – amongst many other things it’s the key behind mind mapping. Making public some of my own associations I can see a connection between Amy’s thoughts, Tony Goodson’s Butterfly moments and bricolage (worth noting that Tony is a fervent advocate of mind mapping) and the ideas I tried to capture here, in particular:
The benefits of any specific piece of knowledge are not always forseeable until the right combination of circumstances and other people arises – in other words unpredictable emergent behaviour;
Another possible connection is to The Social Origins of Good Ideas
Where Amy particularly extends our thinking is the way she then derives some very specific ideas for enhancements to knowledge management tools that would take advantage of associative thinking:
* Random elements [...]
* Visual juxtaposition [...]
* Embedded brainstorming tools
* Sticky notes (that capture context for the thought) [...]
There’s an interesting challenge for developers here but not an insurmountable one I think… Just needs someone with the skill to hang together a few existing tools perhaps?
In a sense a blog entry like this is a form of the fourth item (“Sticky notes”) because it captures an idea and via a combination of hyperlinks and the use of trackbacks captures a a lot of the context as well – but it’s not exactly fast – how many ideas slip by before you can grab the idea and it’s context? I think we need a system that treats “ideas” as some kind of atom and deals with the messy business of collecting and managing URIs in the background.
For embedded brainstorming tools could someone integrate Freemind with a bliki?
Are there any open source developers out there who feel inspired by this?
Technorati Tags: Creativity_Tools, Knowledge_Management, Psychology
In “An Evening of Blues and Separateness”:http://bookoflife.blogs.com/welcome/2004/06/blues_and_separ.html Denny Coates writes about his observations at a social event:
bq. I’m aware that most of the people I encounter in my world are part of the mainstream, and I departed from that a long time ago. This evening, I was aware that most of these good people were operating from a set of assumptions that I no longer relate to. In the old days, my feeling of separateness might have been called “alienation.” In truth, I’m happy with my perspective. It’s what allows me to be true to myself, to be real, to encounter, as best I can, the world as it is, without expectations or assumptions. Which is my source of happiness and spirituality. But I do sometimes feel like a “stranger in a strange land.”
I found a resonance with my own feelings in this post. A few years ago, whilst doing my NLP training, I rediscovered an image from my early years that seemed to have affected a lot of my life – I remember when I was 5, in my first year of school, I was set some extra work (allegedly a “bright” child!) and for some reason the teacher sent me outside to work in the corridor.
From exploring this image during my training I began to see the impact it had had on my life and the power it had as a metaphor of seperateness – a conflict between “doing well” and connecting with my peers. Now as a mature man I have learned how to feel connection, how to engage and associate in the moment but the “boy outside the classroom” remains – I have learned how to use his power rather than fear what seperateness and difference might mean, to appreciate the insights he still sends me.
Some of the questions that come to me as I think about the people Denny calls “the mainstream”: do they not feel this, or do they get a hint of it and as a result try even harder to connect and conform? Are people like Denny and I gifted or cursed? Are we shamans or (incipient, potential) sociopaths? Are we over or under developed? It’s all about perspective and framing I suggest…
Denny responded to some of these questions in the “comments”:http://bookoflife.blogs.com/welcome/2004/06/blues_and_separ.html :
bq. Are independent thinkers gifted or cursed? Surely there are the downsides, the so-called alienation, which can bring acute discomfort if one lets it. Personally, I’ve learned to cherish my separateness as the best part of me; it’s what makes everything else work. It’s kind of like living in a state of ambiguity, but that’s cool, because so much of life is truly unknowable anyway. Living that truth makes for a lot of excitement. It’s certainly not a worldview I would promote to anyone, however, but simply something that helps me affirm my own life in my own way.
Similar-but-different to how I feel about it. For me the “boy outside” contributes to at least two aspects of who I am today. In part he has turned into the observer part of my mind – able to stand back even when the rest of me is fully engaged and take a look at what’s going on. It’s a great attribute for coaching or negotiating or any kind of face-to-face communication – although one that is almost impossible to explain to people. The other descendant is my independence of thought – although I have my upbringing to thank for that as well – my father in particular managed to put across the message that you should make your own mind up, especially about the important things.
Technorati Tags: Psychology, Self_Development, Spirit
Elizabeth Lane Lawley points to an AP article that refers to this project on the psychological and health benefits of expressing gratitude for the good things in your life.
The idea that there is a relationship between thoughts and health is not a new one in the NLP field. See for example the Institute for the Advanced Studies of Health.
What is interesting is to see how scientists are now finding ways within the scientific paradigm to prove the existence of these effects – for example the whole field of PsychoNeuroImmunology.
Coming back to the spirit of Liz’s post, in the extended entry is my own gratitude list…
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Technorati Tags: NLP, Psychology, Spirit
How To Be Happy in the Guardian on Thursday tells the story of the “positive psychologists” who have been meeting at the Royal Society to discuss “the science of well-being”.
Leading light of this movement is Martin Seligman who is quoted in the article thus:
I used to think that all you had to do to get a happy person was get rid of the negatives in their life, but if that’s all you do, you don’t get a happy person, you get an empty person. You need the positives too
The article goes on with more of Seligman’s views:
He believes there are three routes to happiness, which he calls the “pleasant life”, the “good life” and the “meaningful life”. Some are better than others, although a mix of all three is ideal.
The pleasant life sees superficial pleasures as the key to happiness, and it is this that many people mistakenly pursue, he says. “The biggest mistake that people in the rich west make is to be enchanted with the Hollywood idea of happiness, which is really just giggling and smiling a lot,” he says. While a life bent on instant pleasure and gratification offers some degree of happiness, it is ultimately unsatisfying on its own, he says.
Money, it turns out, isn’t the answer either. Seligman believes that once we have enough to pay for life’s basics such as food and a roof over our heads, more money adds little to our happiness.
Seligman identifies signature strengths as keys to the good and meaningful life – applying these signature strengths to our lives leads to an increasing sense of flow – what he calls “the good life” – whilst he suggests that applying them to help others adds meaning to our lives.
There is (of course) a book and a website – the site allows you to take the quizzes in the book, in particular to identify your own signature strengths
Having filled in the quiz, it identifies my signature strengths as: (full results in extended entry)
- Love of learning
- Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
- Curiosity and interest in the world
- Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness
- Perspective (wisdom)
All of which feel like a good fit to the things I enjoy, and when applied to work an equally good fit to the things I do well. So on this sample of one it makes sense!
Finally, is it scientific? There are critics who say the approach is not research-based. The last word belongs to Seligman:
If it’s not backed up by good scientific data, it will collapse like a house of cards, and it will deserve to
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Technorati Tags: Psychology
Over at Reforming Project Management Hal Macomber is seeking to transfer the learning from Lean Production into the project management world.
In Lean Production there exists the concept of the “visual workplace”, commonly expressed through the 5S model. Hal points out that projects may not always involve material products and resources but always involve people and conversations; it therefore makes sense to translate the 5S model into what he calls the 5R Protocol for a Listening Workplace:
- Roles
- Rules
- Reflection
- Relationships
- Routines
What’s interesting is the way his own thinking is developing as he reflects on this model and the conditions that need to be in place for real changes to happen – critically the need for having the right mental distinctions to notice what is really important and then taking action based on those distinctions:
What we notice has to do with the distinctions we can make and the routines that we follow. Both our noticing and effectiveness in action increase as we take action. If we want to work in a lean way we need the distinctions of lean and we need to take action. [...] Learning to operate in a lean way happens by doing projects in a lean way.
For me this sits well with the model of cognition used by NLP:
Our habitual perceptual filters control what we actually notice in our surroundings – an engineer will notice different things from an HR expert. The mental programs we use (or habitual ways of thinking) will then influence what meaning we ascribe to those things and therefore influence our conscious intent about what to do. Those same mental programs will distort our conscious intent into our everyday strategies, which in turn result in actions and words that fit with our perceptual filters. The whole system is both recursive and self-reinforcing – the success of actions we take in the world tends to strengthen the perceptual filters and mental programs that led to us choosing those actions.
In such a model changing behaviour often needs the conscious adoption of new filters and disctinctions re-inforced by action until new unconscious mental programs take hold. This is where coaching is especially useful to remind the person who is changing what they should be paying attention to.
What Hal is doing with his 5R model is start to express the things that make a difference in order to get “Lean Projects” right – it will be interesting to see how he develops this into practical tools that can not only be applied but through their application embed new ways of thinking.
Technorati Tags: Coaching, NLP, Project_Management, Psychology
Gary Lawrence Murphy picks up the thread about Bridges and Bubbles and asks some fundamental questions about how we should evaluate the value of each link on the graph:
The bridge itself may be an accident of happenstance and bandwidth, but to grow ourselves, we’re enticed (or compelled) to test each path for inter-networked recommender bridges out from our own local space [...] Seeking Matt’s glittering cave moments, we cross over those bridges we find, and some of us become (by accident or design) new bridges for others. What’s important, the effect we want, arises not from the number of bridge paths, but by their quality, and it’s a totally subjective quality, and therefore unpredictable. Far from the networking is everything approach of Thomas Power, [...] perhaps a more efficient strategy may be a second-order goal to cultivate relationships with connected (bridging) individuals to discover what bubbles they know but also to suss out our personal metrics of the qualities of their knowledge; as with sex, quality beats quantity
Gary goes on to link this to earlier comments he wrote about the role of trust. (and that in itself is linked to a fascinating dialogue on trust that Gary has contributed to on Knowledge Board) The conversation stretches across several platforms and the interchange relevant here is between Gary and Ton Zijlstra
To summarise, Gary’s key point is
that ‘trust’ arises from a brainstate, an emotional sensation
whereas Ton says
So if we say we trust someone, this means that we recognize a consistent pattern of behaviour, and a certain level of predictability (reputation) in the other.
Gary notes (and Ton acknowledges) that most of the participants in the Knowledge Board discussion appeared to shy away from this “animal effect” to look for “higher” reasons for trust, and goes on to suggest
The more correct response is, IMHO, that while our brain colours our perceptions, humans are so blazingly successful on this planet because we can (not that we do, just that we can) transcend our physiology (when it’s appropriate!) to reach for higher conclusions.
The thing that I notice about this discussion is the Cartesian brain-vs-physiology dualism of it. IMHO looking through a systemic neuro-semantic frame will allow us to combine both insights, perhaps leading to more clarity…
Like all systems with feedback loops it’s easy to get caught into chicken-and-egg thinking if you ask which comes first – the somatic response or the meta-state thought structure about the value of a consistent pattern of perceived behaviour. It’s a truism in neuro-semantics that meta-states collapse very quickly into a neuro-physiological state. Unpicking this to explore (and maybe change) the higher level states is an important step to understand what is happening… Ton appears to have done that unpicking, and for him the feeling of trust is associated with the cognitive state of recognising consistent behaviour. Ton doesn’t mention if he actually makes his trust-based decisions on a gut feeling or whether he consciously explores the history of consistent behaviour. My guess in the absence of data is the former (but open to correction!)…
Some questions come to mind:
- Do other people share Ton’s criteria for trust?
- What other criteria might apply?
- What evidence can we glean from online connections that might allow those criteria to be applied?
- Could we create new forms of information that would help that discrimination?
- How do we Mind-to-Muscle those mental states to give an emotional signal for “online trust” that will work as a shorthand?
Lots more to do, and I’m sure others out there are further down the path. In the meantime perhaps we are, as Gary says, “back to clicking on pure blind faith”!
Technorati Tags: Knowledge_Management, Psychology
In today’s Observer magazine Andrew G Marshall writes about his application of ideas from Malcom Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point to the field of couples counselling.
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Technorati Tags: Coaching, NLP, Psychology, Systems
Article in the Guardian on Ad Vingerhoets’ research into people who get ill whenever they stop work… Other work published by Vingerhoets is listed here
Technorati Tags: Psychology
Moving longer articles from old site. Here ( as a PDF file) is a piece I wrote a couple of years ago to serve as a general introduction to NLP.
Technorati Tags: Articles, NLP, Psychology
One of the things that’s been keeping me away from blogging over the last few months is taking some trainings in, and reading about, Neuro Semantics. More detail on Neuro-Semantics another time, but for now I’ll describe it as an extension to the NLP model of human perception.
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Technorati Tags: Psychology
A stress management expert wants the US to have a special day when people are banned from being grumpy. She wants people to be fined for frowning and to wear special hats when they’re caught being unhappy. (via EVHEAD)
Technorati Tags: Psychology
In wiring my mind Swerdloff gives a great description of a practical application of the NLP Anchoring technique to associate a particular song with the moment of perfect beauty as he kisses his girl…
“I have a strange question” I told her. “Yeah?” “Can I kiss you? For the duration of this song.” “Of course.” It was only a strange question because of the song…
Technorati Tags: NLP, Psychology
In his longer article You Are Brighter Than You Think he notes the “first law of psychology”
Each time you notice something which others likely have not, even if seemingly trivial, like the play of shadows on the wall or the way So-and-So came into the room–and you don’t express or record that bit of observation, you are reinforcing the behavior of being unobservant. Each time you do express or record such an observation, you are not only reinforcing that perception a la the Principle of Description, but you are reinforcing the behavior of being perceptive and observant.
This is the principle behind his well-known Image Streaming technique for creative problem solving.
I was struck by the parallel with something Rebecca Blood wrote in weblogs: a history and perspective:
Shortly after I began producing Rebecca’s Pocket I noticed two side effects I had not expected. First, I discovered my own interests. I thought I knew what I was interested in, but after linking stories for a few months I could see that I was much more interested in science, archaeology, and issues of injustice than I had realized. More importantly, I began to value more highly my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important.
Technorati Tags: Psychology
In his October Winsights column Win Wenger encourages us to think of ourselves
as a rather complex swirl of confluent possibilities, interacting with other streams of possibility amidst larger overall flow.
Win has some fascinating ideas, and I find it intriguing how his scientific approach to stretching the human mind seems to have so much in common with certain ancient teachings.
While you’re “over that way” why not check out his May 2001 article “What Does It Mean to be You?” where he asks
“Is it significant to be who you are and to do what you are doing? [...] How much of what I am today is me and how much is chance? [...] IF we do proceed on the presently questionable assumptions that we ARE individually unique and that our choices and actions DO have significant meaning, we have at least a somewhat better chance of meaningful achievements than if we don’t thus proceed. Given those alternatives, the presumption seems justified on the grounds that, as of yet in this snapshot moment of unfolding civilization and history, we have yet to unfold the right questions, much less the right answers. [...] There are things your eyes have seen that no other human eyes have seen � thoughts you’ve thought (consciously or no), insights and appreciations you’ve arrived at. [...] I don’t think that I am cultivating illusion by holding open richer possibilities rather than prematurely precluding them. [...]Along the way, though, I do have to wonder at our system of justice and of judicial punishment[...]it’s clear that the system’s operation as a deterrence to crime leaves something to be desired[...] [also] I see three sectors of boundless opportunity which we are woefully underplaying:
- the raising and educating of our children.
- The rapid development of space, in the solar system and possibly beyond.
- Human life-extension.”
And while I was catching up on Win’s site this caught my eye.
“I fully intend to be around for many afternoons to come, but were I to die this afternoon, this is one thing I will want to have gotten said:
‘Hear one another out. Draw each other out. And when it’s your turn to be speaking, pay far more attention to what you are actually perceiving than to what you know. And don’t repeat yourself much. The universe is infinite: by attending your own perceptions, you are infinite. And so also is that person you are drawing out. Even the least of us is a window on God, whatever your definition.’ “
Technorati Tags: collective_intelligence, Psychology, Spirit
