Representational Systems Within NLP
"At the core of NLP is the belief that, when people are engaged in activities, they are also making use of a representational system; that is, they are using some internal representation of the materials they are involved with, such as a conversation, a rifle shot, a spelling task. These representations can be visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or involve the other senses. In addition, a person may be creating a representation or recalling one. For example, a person asked to spell a word may visualize that word printed on a piece of paper, may hear it being sounded out, or may construct the spelling from the application of a series of logical rules." Daniel Druckman (Ed.) (1988), Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques(pp.138-139)
According to NLP, for many practical purposes mental processing of events and memories can be treated as if performed by the five senses. For example, Einstein credited his discovery of special relativity to a mental visualization strategy of "sitting on the end of a ray of light", and many people as part of decision-making talk to themselves in their heads.
The manner in which this is done, and the effectiveness of the mental strategy employed, is stated by NLP to play a critical part in the way mental processing takes place. This observation led to the concept of a preferred representational system, the classification of people into fixed visual, auditory or kinesthetic stereotypes. This idea was later discredited and dropped within NLP by the early 1980s, in favor of the understanding that most people use all of their senses (whether consciously or unconsciously), and that whilst one system may seem to dominate, this is often contextualized - globally there is a balance that dynamically varies according to circumstance and mood.
NLP asserts that for most circumstances and most people, three of the five sensory based modes seem to dominate in mental processing:
- visual thoughts - sight, mental imagery, spatial awareness
- auditory (or linguistic) thoughts - sound, speech, dialog, white noise
- kinesthetic (or proprioceptive) sense - somatic feelings in the body, temperature, pressure, and also emotion.
The other two senses, gustatory (taste) and olfactory (smell), which are closely associated, often seem to be less significant in general mental processing, and are often considered jointly as one.
For this reason, one often sees the term VAK in NLP reference texts, to signify these three primary representational systems, as well as the term 4-tuple (or VAKOG) if the author wishes to include all senses including taste/smell. The same term is also known as First Access (John Grinder), or primary experience (Freud).
Read more about this topic: Representational Systems (NLP)
Famous quotes containing the word systems:
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—Don Delillo (b. 1926)