Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

I have always thought it was interesting that when people are arguing about a point that doesn't matter, they say "It's academic." John Grinder and I were forced to leave teaching at the University of California because we were teaching undergraduates to do things in their lives. That was the complaint against us. They said school was only for teaching people about things.

When I was an undergraduate, the only courses I did badly in were psychology and public speaking. I flunked psychology 1A, and I got a "D" in public speaking! How's that for a joke? NLP is my revenge.

In my contacts with educators, I've noticed that the people who teach a subject may be very good at it, and know a tot about that particular area. However, they usually know very little about how they learned it, and even less about how to teach it to someone else. I went to a lecture in a beginning chemistry class once. The professor walked up in front of 350 people and said, "Now I want you to imagine a mirror here, and in front of the mirror is a DNA helix molecule, rotating backwards." Some people in the room were going "Ahhh!" They became chemists. Some people in the room were going "Huh?" They did not become chemists. Some people in the room were going "Urghh!" They became therapists!

That professor had no idea that most people can't visualize in the detailed way that he did. That kind of visualization is a prerequisite for a successful career in chemistry, and it is a skill that can be taught to people who don't yet know how to visualize well. But since that professor presupposed that everyone else could already do what he did, he was wasting his time with most of the people in his classes.

Most studies of the learning process have been "objective." What NLP does is to explore the subjective experience of the processes by which people learn things. "Objective" studies usually study people who have the problem; NLP studies the subjective experience of people who have the solution. If you study dyslexia, you'll learn a lot about dyslexia. But if you want to teach kids how to read, it makes sense to study people who can read well.

When we made up the name "Neuro–Linguistic Programming," a lot of people said, "It sounds like 'mind control,' " as if that were something bad. I said "Yes, of course." If you don't begin to control and use your own brain, then you have to just leave it to chance. That is sort of what our educational system is like. They keep the content in front of you for twelve years; if you learn it, then they taught it to you. There are a lot of ways that the existing educational system is failing, and I'd like to discuss several of them.

"School phobias "

One of the most pervasive problems is that a lot of kids have already had bad experiences in school. Because of this, a certain subject, or school in general, becomes a cue that triggers bad memories that make a kid feel bad. And in case you haven't noticed, people don't learn very much when they're feeling bad. If a kid's response is really strong, psychologists even describe it as a "school phobia." Feeling bad in response to school situations can be changed rapidly by using a number of the techniques we've described and demonstrated earlier, but I'd like to show you another very simple way to do it.

How many of you have bad feelings about mathematics —fractions, square roots, quadratic equations and stuff like that? (He writes a long string of equations on the board and a number of people groan or sigh.)

Now close your eyes and think of an experience you had that was absolutely marvelous — some situation in which you felt excited and curious. . . .

Now open your eyes for a second or two to look at these equations, and then close your eyes and return to that marvelous experience. . . .

Now open your eyes to look at the equations for several seconds more, and then return to your exciting experience again. Alternate a few more times until those two experiences are thoroughly integrated. . . .

Now it's time to test. First look away and think of any experience that's neutral for you, . . . and then look up here at the equations, and notice your response – Man: My God, it works!

This is actually an old NLP method we call "integrating anchors." If you want to know more about that, you can read Frogs into Princes. Changing most bad responses to school can be done that easily and quickly, but you have to know how the brain works to be able to do it. (If you want to try this method yourself, you will find a page of equations in Appendix VI.)

A more imaginative way to use the same principle is to always connect learning with fun and enjoyment to start with. In most schools they have the kids all lined up sitting still in neat, silent rows. I always ask, "How long until the kids get to laugh, move, and enjoy themselves?" If you connect boredom and discomfort with learning, it's no wonder nobody wants to do it. One of the great things about computer–assisted education is that computers are more fun to be with than most teachers. Computers have infinite patience, and never make kids feel bad the way a lot of teachers do.

Remembering

Another major problem for many kids is remembering the stuff they learn in school. A lot of what is called education is simply memorizing. This is changing somewhat. Teachers are starting to realize that the amount of information is so huge, expanding so rapidly, and changing so fast, that memorization isn't nearly as

important as they used to think. It's much more important now to be able to find the facts when you need them, use them, and forget them. However, you do have to be able to remember how to do that.

One aspect of memory is similar to what we just discussed: Is the memory paired with a pleasant or unpleasant experience? In order for someone to remember something, he has to go back into the state of consciousness in which the information was provided. That's how memory works. If you make someone angry or unhappy when you ask him to do something, in order to remember it he has to get back into that state. Since he doesn't want to feel bad, he is not likely to remember it. This is why most of us have total amnesia for 12 or 16 years of education. I can't even remember teachers' names let alone most of what I was taught or any of the events. But I can remember the last day of school!

What's your name?

Woman: Lydia.

You forgot your name tag.¹ The only way I can remember names is to hallucinate name tags on people. Every time I meet people I keep looking at their left breast; people think I'm a pervert now. I taught for Xerox once and since everybody had Xerox labels on, I kept calling people "Xerox" all day. It's one of those things; your brain learns to do it, and once it realizes it's of no value it continues anyway.

Lydia, if you forget your name tag, I'll think that you are sneaking into this seminar, and I'll install certain suggestions . . . that will stay with you for the rest of your life. If you have a name tag, I don't do that. You only get suggestions that stay with you for a short period of time.

Lydia, I'm going to tell you a number: 357. Now I want you to forget the number I just told you. . . . Have you forgotten it yet? (No.) If you can't forget one number when a number has no meaning, how could you forget your name tag, or important content in a seminar? Have you forgotten it yet? (No.) Now, how is it possible that you can't forget something that has no importance?

Lydia: If we keep talking about it, I'll remember it even more. It doesn't matter if it is important or not. Especially since you are asking me to forget it, I won't forget it.

That makes sense. . . . Did you see how many people nodded when you said that? "Oh yeah, you asked me to forget it, so I have to remember it. After all, it has no importance but we are talking about it. If you ask me to forget something that has been talked about for a long time that isn't important, I have to remember it." It's bizarre, isn't it? ... But she is right.

It sounds weird, but even though it sounds weird, you know she's right. Her saying that is as weird as her doing it. Yet psychologists will ignore that as if it has no significance, and go on to study things like "oedipal complexes" and many other strange things. Psychologists will pass up studying how people remember things in favor of studying what "depth" of trance you have been in — that's the metaphor where trance is a hole that you fall into, and going deeper is of great value. The people who talk about "levels of consciousness" disagree; they think it's better to go higher, not deeper.

If I didn't talk about it very long, and talked about it in just the right way, she could forget a number with only three digits. Lydia can forget her name tag, even though people told her it was important. Many of you try to get people to remember things. How many of you talk to people about things that are important, yet they forget what you said? And you thought it was their fault! Remember that when you want someone else to remember something.

Except for torturing rats, probably more psychologists' time has gone into studying memory than any other subject. However, they've never really gotten at how people do it in terms of subjective experience.

How many of you have trouble remembering telephone numbers? Most of you probably try to do it auditorily, by verbally repeating the numbers to yourself. Many of you were taught the multiplication tables by auditory recitation. Even when that is successful, it's very slow, because you have to recite all those words inside to get to the answer. "Nine, seven, three . . . zero, four, six, eight"; "Nine times six is fifty–four." For a lot of information it's much more efficient to memorize it visually instead of auditorily: 973–0468, 9 x 6 = 54. When you remember visually, the entire picture pops into your mind at once, and you just skip to the information you need, and read it or copy it down. A lot of kids who are considered "slow learners" are simply remembering auditorily instead of visually. When you take an hour or two to teach them how to do it visually, they learn much more rapidly.

On the other hand, some people try to remember music by making pictures or having feelings, instead of hearing the sounds. So it's always a matter of remembering in a way that's appropriate to what you want to remember.

Another good way to have a bad memory is to do something totally irrelevant to memorizing the data. If you repeat to yourself, "I've got to remember the phone number," then what you will remember is that sentence, rather than the phone number! A lot of people do something like that, and then wonder why they have such "bad memories." Actually their memories are excellent; they're just using them to remember idiotic things.

If you study people who have phenomenal memories, you find out that they do some really interesting things. One man with an excellent memory puts subtitles under all his pictures. He actually prints words on his pictures that describe what the pictures are about. That short verbal description codes and categorizes the memory, so that it's easy to go back to it. It's like putting a title on a movie, so you can glance at the title and know what it's about without having to watch the entire movie. In the computer business we call that a "drop tag code" — something that is arbitrary but distinctive, that relates to this and also relates to that, linking them together.

We had a woman in a seminar once who was rapidly introduced to forty–five people by first and last name. That's all it took for her to know everyone's name. I've seen Harry Lorayne do the same thing with about three hundred people on a TV show. When this woman was introduced to someone, she would focus on something very distinctive in what she saw — the shape of the nose, skin coloring, chin, or whatever she spontaneously noticed that was unique about that person. She would continue to focus on this distinctive feature as she heard the person's name, and that would connect the two together. She even checked herself quickly by looking away briefly to visualize that unique feature, and listen for the name, to make sure the connection had been made. I like to have people wear name tags, so I don't have to bother to do that. However, it certainly is a useful talent that could be taught to salespeople. They often have to deal with many people, and it's considered important to remember their names and be personally friendly with them.

If you deal with people mostly over the telephone, this visual method won't work. However, you can easily adapt it to the auditory system: notice something distinctive about the person's voice tone or tempo as you hear the name, and hear the name spoken with that distinctive feature. Very visual people might prefer to imagine the name visually as they hear it. You can always adapt a memory strategy in this way, to make it appropriate to the context or the skills of the person who wants to recall something.

If you really want to remember a name, pair it with something unique in all three major representational systems: auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. While you listen to the sound of the name, spoken in his voice tone, you could notice something unique in what you see as you look at him, and also what you feel as you shake hands. Since that gives you a drop tag code in each major system, you will have three different ways to recall the name.

Another way to have a "good memory" is to be as efficient and economical as possible in what you do remember, and to use what you have already remembered as much as possible. For instance, if you always put your keys in the right front pocket of your pants, you only have to remember that once. Someone who puts her keys in many different places may have to remember it four or five times each day, instead of once in a lifetime.

One of our students has a couple of businesses and has to file a lot of papers and records. Whenever something has to be filed, he asks himself, "Where would I look for this when I need it," and starts moving toward the file cabinet. As he does this, an image of a particular file tab appears in his mind, and he files it there. This method uses what he has already remembered to organize his files, so he seldom has to remember anything new. Each time he files this item he strengthens the existing connection between it and the file tab, making the system more dependable each time.

One way of thinking about these two examples is that they create a situation in which you have to remember as little as possible. Here's another example. Take a look at the set of numbers below for a few moments, and then look away and see how much of it you can remember. . . .

149162536496481100

Now look at it long enough so that you can still remember it when you look away. . . .

If you have actually tried this, you probably started to group the numbers into twos or threes to organize the task and make remembering easier:

14,91,62,53,64,96,48,11,00

Or

149,162,536,496,481,100

This is a process we call "chunking": breaking a large task down into smaller, more manageable, pieces. In business there's an old joke, "How do you eat an elephant?" The answer is, "One bite at a time."

At this point, how long do you think you could remember this number accurately? — an hour? — a day? — a week?

Now let's chunk the number a little differently. Does this suggest anything to you?

1 4 9 16 25 36 49 64 81 100

We can write this same set of numbers a little differently, as squares of numbers:1²2²3²4²5²6²7²8²9²10²

Now it's obvious that the number we started with is the squares of the numbers 1 through 10, strung together. Knowing this, you can easily remember this number ten or twenty years from now. What makes it so easy? You have much less to remember, and it's all coded in terms of things that you have already remembered. This is what math and science is all about — coding the world efficiently and elegantly, so that you have fewer things to remember, leaving your brain free to do other things that are more fun and interesting.

Those are just a few of the principles that can make remembering a lot easier and faster. Unfortunately they're not yet used much in mainstream education.

"Learning Disabilities "

One of the nice things that happens after you write enough books is that people let you do things that you wanted to do before, but couldn't. Typically by that time you can't quite remember what they were, but I had written some of them down. When I was asked to work for a school district, I had a few things I wanted to go after. One of them is the whole notion of "learning disabilities," "minimal brain dysfunction," "dyslexia," or "educational handicaps." Those are very important – sounding words, but what they all describe is that the teaching isn't working.

Whenever a kid isn't learning, experts are quick to conclude that the problem is a "learning disability," ... but they're never quite clear about who has it! Perhaps you've noticed that they never call it a "teaching disability." The implication is always that the cause of the failure is that the kid's brain is weak or damaged, often by presumed genetic causes. When people don't know how to change something, they often start searching for a way to justify failure, rather than thinking about how they could try doing something different to make it work. If you assume that a kid has a limp learning lobe, then there's nothing you can do about it until they perfect brain grafts.

I'd rather not explain failure that way. I'd rather think about it as a "teaching dysfunction," and at least leave open the possibility that we can learn to change it. If we pretend that you can teach anyone anything, we'll find out where it's not (yet) true. But if we think that when someone isn't learning it means they can't be taught, no one will even try.

In the last century it was common knowledge that man couldn't fly. Then when airplanes became a part of everyday life, most people didn't think it was possible to put a man on the moon. If you take the attitude that anything is possible, you'll find that a lot of things that were previously thought impossible actually do become possible.

The whole idea of "learning disabilities" is based primarily on old neurological "ablation" studies that resulted from a fairly primitive idea of how the brain works: that you can figure out what something does by noticing what happens when it's broken. They would find damage in one part of the brain of someone who couldn't talk, and say, "That's where speech is." That is the same logic as cutting a wire in a television set, noticing that the picture tilts, and saying, "That wire is where the picture straightness is." There are thousands of wires, connections, and transistors involved in holding the picture straight, in a very complex and interdependent system, and the brain is a lot more complex than a TV set. For some of the more primitive areas of the brain there actually is a certain degree of localization of function. However, it's also been known for years that a young child can lose an entire cerebral hemisphere and learn everything all over again perfectly on the other side.

Recent evidence is throwing out a lot of old neurological dogma. In an X–Ray Tomography study they found a college graduate with an 10 of 120 who had such enlarged brain ventricles that his cortex was only about a centimeter thick! Most of his skull was filled with fluid, and according to dogma, he shouldn't have been able to get up in the morning, let alone go to college!

Another old dogma is that in vertebrates no new neurons are formed after birth. Last year they found that the number of neurons in the part of a male canary's brain devoted to singing doubles each spring, and then half of them die off during the rest of the year.

In another study they found that if you remove a monkey's finger, the part of the brain that used to serve the missing finger gets used by the neighboring fingers within a few weeks, and this makes the remaining fingers more sensitive than before. All recent information points to the brain being much more flexible and adaptive than we used to think it was.

I never liked the idea of children being "educationally handicapped," because I never thought that reading was primarily genetic. A child can learn to talk in three years, even in the jungle without Ph.D. parents! Why should it take ten more years to teach him to read the same thing he already knows how to say? Kids in ghettos can learn three languages at once, and they can learn to write all kinds of things in secret codes. But the way things are taught in schools produces a situation in which some kids aren't learning to read. Some of you may remember classes where you didn't learn much because of the atrocious way the material was presented.

Learning to read is really not that difficult. All you have to do is connect the picture of the word with the sound of the word that you already know. If you know the spoken word, you have already connected that sound with an experience of what that word means. When you were a child, you probably learned pretty early that the sound "cat" meant a soft furry little moving thing with claws that meows. The way you do that in your brain is to hear the word "cat" at the same time that you recall your experience of the sight, sound, and feeling of a cat. Then if someone says the word, that experience is there in your mind, and if you see, hear, or feel a cat, the sound of the word is there. All reading does is to add a picture of the word into what you already know. When you see the word "dog," you get a different sound and picture in your mind than when you see the word "cat."

Now that seems pretty simple, and it is. Yet there is an enormous amount of claptrap written about reading problems, and a huge amount of effort goes into trying to solve reading problems. In contrast, there is an NLP–trained group in Denver (see Appendix V) that works with all kinds of educational problems. They will guarantee to raise a kid's reading level, as measured by standard tests, by a minimum of one grade level in a set of eight one–hour sessions. Usually they can make much more progress in a shorter time. In the last three years they have only had to pay off on their guarantee once. Their only prerequisite is that the kid has muscular stability in using his eyes, so he can see what he's trying to read.

Drugs

One of the other things I wanted to go after in the school system is the widespread practice of prescribing drugs like Ritalin for "hyperactive" kids who have trouble sitting quietly in rows for long periods of time, Ritalin slows them down so the teacher can keep up with them. Giving these kids drugs is always defended by saying that the drugs are harmless. One of the interesting things about Ritalin is that although it slows down hyperactive kids, its effect on adults is more like an amphetamine: it speeds them up.

So when I talked to this school district I said, "This Ritalin that you're giving the kids slows them down, but it speeds up adults, right? And you're all convinced that it's perfectly safe, and has no harmful side effects, right? Good. I have a proposal that will save you a lot of money. Stop giving it to the kids, and give it to the teachers, so that they can speed up and keep up with the kids." They were boxed in with their own logic, but they still didn't like it. Try suggesting that at your school and find out how many of those "learning disabled teachers" are willing to take a "perfectly harmless drug." The same thing happens with psychiatrists; they almost never prescribe psychoactive drugs for other psychiatrists when they're hospitalized! After thirty years of prescribing phenothiazine drugs, now they've found it causes something called "Tardive Dyskinesia" later in life. It affects your muscles so you shake all over and have trouble walking or picking up a teacup.

Woman: I'm a teacher, and just last week I was in a staff conference with a diagnostician, a nurse, and another teacher. The nurse said, "I think we should prescribe drugs for this kid," and the others nodded their heads. I got really angry, and said, "I can't believe that with all the focus on drug abuse you're recommending that this kid take drugs! How would you like to take drugs?" The diagnostician said, "I take drugs every night to calm down." And the other teacher said, "So do I." And the nurse said, "I take Valium every day." I couldn't believe it, and I was so shocked I didn't know what to say.

Well, taking drugs yourself is a lot different than forcing them on someone else. I think people should choose their own drugs. What's really sad is that most of the problems people are prescribing drugs for can be changed so easily using NLP. Any NLP practitioner should be able to fix a school phobia in half an hour, and most bad spellers can be made into good spellers in an hour or two.

However, you have to be a little careful now. NLP is starting to get well known, and a lot of unqualified people are claiming to have NLP training. There are even a few people claiming to be "the foremost NLP trainer" who have only gone through one training! That's the kind of thing that happens whenever something effective starts to get known, so be a little cautious and ask a few questions of anybody who claims to be trained in NLP.

Some good NLP people are going back into special education classes and wantonly wiping out all kinds of learning problems right and left. When you know how to find out how someone's brain works, it's relatively easy to teach him how to use it in a way that's more effective and efficient.

The capacity for learning is really actualized not when somebody inundates you with the content, but when someone can teach you the mechanism by which it can be done: the subjective structures and sequences that are necessary for learning.