Introduction to Submodalities

This post is a followup to my last post, NLP Accessing Cues and Representational Systems, in which I discussed how the little idiosyncrasies of our mental wiring lead to non-verbal behaviors which put on display some of the crazy processes that go on inside of our heads.
What necessarily follows from that is a discussion of Submodalities. So, if you haven't already, please read the previous post.

In the following video, Derren Brown toys with a woman's submodalities and uses his skills of state-elicitation and anchoring to first produce belief change (subtle, visible changes in her physiology mark the change in belief) and then mess with her perceptions. Read on and find out what is going on here.

VIDEO LINK http://youtu.be/UdlItEIj8bg

What are Sub Modalities? Previously, I discussed how different types of sensory information are stored and accessed in different Representational Systems through out the brain; visual information has its own representational system, as does auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory. These Representational Systems can be considered our modes of experience. Therefore,a Submodality is a quality of experience through a particular mode.

Using the Visual Representational System as our basis for discussion, we can talk about qualities of an image such as brightness, size, location in space, color, color saturation, translucency or opaqueness.. These are submodalities of the visual representation system (for some odd reason, NLP literature rarely uses the word "mode" here). Just as the representational systems we are using tend to be displayed in our body language and eye accessing cues , the words we tend to use show others how we as individuals favor certain representational systems over others.
In a discussion, one person may say "I see your point," while another person could say "I hear what you're saying." Submodalities come in the forms of verbs (see, smell, wrestle, burn), adjectives (sour, bright, near, small), and adverbs (bitterly, strongly, vividly).

To illustrate this further, try this exercise: Take some calm, slow, deep breaths for a few moments. Feel yourself really relaxing. Feel your brain slip into a lower gear, and allow your focus to deepen. Now once you are in this state, think of a time when you felt REALLY good (it can be dirty-- this is a private mental experience after all:-). Notice the different aspects of this representation in your mind. What are the images, sounds, smells, feelings? You may be smiling already, and that's great! But try this; make the image bigger, brighter, more vivid. Make the sounds richer and louder, and intensify the smells and feelings.... are you smiling bigger and brighter now? I bet you're feeling pretty good.

If you're like most people, the simple exercise above changed the state of your brain at least a little. It changed your emotions and physiology for the moment, and put you in a pretty good mood.There are many implications to this, but the one most interesting to me is how submodalities can be tinkered with in the therapeutic context to produce change in beliefs and behaviors.

The easiest way to explain this is to discuss phobias. With phobias, a person has had some sort of previous traumatic experience from which they go on to develop an irrational fear. Milton H. Erickson, father of modern hypnosis, once worked with a client who had a phobia of the color blue. Through hypnosis they found that the experience behind this phobia was that, as a child, the woman had witnessed the drowning of her sister, and when the rescuers pulled her sister's body from the water she was a horrifying fleshy shade of deep blue. This episode in the woman's history was so traumatizing that the processes of shock compartmentalized the experience in ways that her per-adolescent brain could deal with at the time. She came to forget/repress the most experience, the image of her sister, and the terror she felt, but as time went on she became fearful of the color blue. The color of her dead sister's skin came to represent that horrible experience and any time she saw blue she would panic. The closer the blue was to the shade of her sister's body, the stronger her sense of panic became. The submodality of blueness was intrinsically tied to her fear.

  When in this state of panic, as we've all heard, we get thrown into "Fight or Flight" mode. Joe Navarro, in his excellent guide to reading body language (which you should purchase and read NOW), What Every BODY is Saying, makes the point that in reality, an animal's options are Freeze, Flight, or Fight in that order (perhaps the topic of a future post on this blog). In this state of panic, our Sympathetic Nervous System becomes activated, our heart rate increases, our pupils dilate, airways expand, any bodily functions which don't immediately contribute to our survival are slowed down or stopped, and adrenaline and glucose are dumped into our blood supply for an instant energy boost. By this point, blood flow to our frontal lobes (that which makes us rational and human) has been tremendously restricted and the individual is unreachable by rational discussion. This is why people can spend DECADES in talk therapy calmly laying on a couch in a safe and comfortable room talking about their fear, but still panic whenever they're in the real world and are confronted with the object of their phobia. The fear response, like all emotional responses, bypasses the rational mind.

NLP is particularly effective in working through phobias quickly (often destroying phobias in just a few minutes). This can be accomplished in different ways, but the phobia cure will always involve working with an individual's representational systems and submodalities to change the way they process information. Here, the NLP practitioner discusses the object of the phobia with the client. Aspects of the panic are elicited by talking about the object of the phobia, and the different submodalities that the client uses to describe the object. These aspects of the panic can be "anchored" to a cue, such as a touch on the left knee (this is the old Pavlovian Conditioning you learned about in school). This is then put to the side and the NLP practitioner may then ask the client questions which will elicit a resourceful state, such as confidence and control. When the NLP practitioner senses a change in the client's state (by being sensitive to body language), the practitioner can anchor this resource state, for example, by touching the right knee. In further discussion the NLP practitioner may have the client change their submodalities associated with the object of the phobia, such as making associated images smaller, having the color drain out, framing them in a box, and shooting them off into the distance, while holding the anchor for the resource state. Then the client would be instructed to zoom up a bright and vivid picture of something tied to the resource state to replace the image of the phobic image. They would repeat this several times, all while holding the resource-state anchor. Surprisingly, this tends to be a very effective method for eliminating a phobia.

The way in which our own minds attribute and process submodalities is intrinsically tied in some way to our senses of "certainty and "reality," as Derren Brown has shown us. Through changing the way the woman uses submodalities for her subjective experience of not living up to her potential, the woman was finally able to feel the goal as being more within her grasp. By noticing where she placed her senses of "certainty" and "uncertainty" in her physical and cognitive space, Mr. Brown could use those spaces to alter the woman's perceptions further. It's quite amusing to see how he has the woman doubting that red is red and green is green, but he was just a clever and harmless magician, and it's easy to suspend our defenses in the name of good fun.

The question is, how often do others mess with YOUR submodalities to change the way you think?

NLP Accessing Cues and Representational systems

How is it that you know what you know?
If I asked you to think now of one of the best presents you ever got before you became a teenager, how is it that you know what the present was? How do you recall?

Chances are good that you, like most people, would first get a mental image of the present and of other visual memories associated with it (maybe the scene of the birthday party in which you got it). You may also recreate other aspects of the present and associated experiences, such as the sounds and smells of the environment where and when you received the present. Maybe it was the most popular toy of the Christmas season, and as you opened the package, you smelled cookies and a Christmas ham baking in the oven too.

In order to recall these memories, your brain has to first retrieve or access them from storage, much in the same way that your computer's operating system searches the full memory bank of the computer before retrieving a file you are looking for (and much like how your computer operating system tends to first search the most likely locations in which it thinks the file should be in before extending the search to include the full memory of the PC).

If I were to ask you what your father would have looked like if he wore an eye patch (presuming that in reality he did not wear an eye patch), your brain would have to use its creative powers to generate that image, first by accessing existing images of your father's face, then creating an eye patch for the image.

One interesting phenomenon, which seems to have first been noticed by Dr. Richard Bandler, is how the movements of our eyes betray the cognitive processes that our brains use to recall or create information. Dr. Bandler found that people tend to look up and to the left when accessing visual memories and up and to the right when creating images in their minds. When accessing auditory memories, people's eyes tend to move as if looking to their left ear, and towards the right ear when creating auditory mental experience. Looking down and to the left tends to betray a process of "talking to one's self" or checking our feelings, and looking down and to the right usually accompanies the recall of kinesthetic memory (body movements and sensations). Try looking for these accessing cues when in conversation with a friend.
(Click image for a larger copy)
(image reproduced without permission, please contact me if you are the copyright holder)

It's important to note that the above schematic is not a rigid rule of behavior, but more like a tendency. Accessing cues can and do vary between individuals. It is a normal tendency for right-handed people to glance to the left when recalling information and glance towards the right when creating information, and vice versa for left-handed individuals. Though this may be the other way around for some people. This is why it is important for you to CALIBRATE your observations to the individual you are analyzing. Notice where they glance when they're talking about something they recall, and notice where they glance when confabulating something that never happened. Once you've calibrated to them, it becomes easy to tell when someone is lying (their eyes show that they are accessing their brains creative capacities, rather than accessing recollections)

Here is a simple video illustrating the basics of Eye Accessing Cues

To understand why this happens, we need to have a basic understanding of some very simple principles of the organization of the brain:

Due to some weird idiosyncrasy in the way our nervous systems are wired, as our conscious mind searches different Representational Systems (explained below) in our brains, our eyes move involuntarily.
All of the thoughts we either access or create are dependent upon our previous experience. We can all think about love because we all experienced it at least once before (you could not have survived as an infant without receiving at least some amount of love... but that's another blog post). We can all think about what it would be like to fly like Superman because we have all seen things in flight (if you never saw anything in flight you probably couldn't ever conceive of traveling through the air) and felt the different effects of gravity upon our bodies, so thanks to our experience we can imagine what this would be like, and as a result we may even have very convincing and realistic dreams in which we can fly.
All of our experiences can be divided up into different types of information. Because all of our experiences must first filter through our nervous systems before we become consciously aware of them, we must receive all external experience through our sensory organs. We have senses of touch, smell, taste, hearing, and vision. By taking information from the external environment in through these sensory systems the outside world is able to represent itself within the confines of our little three-pound brains. All sensory information is thus processed in the brain by a representational system. Auditory information tends to get processed in its own section of the brain, as does visual, chemical (smell and taste), and kinesthetic/tactile information.
Recognizing how a person uses their representational systems to store, access, and generate information can be extraordinarily helpful in helping you to communicate more effectively with that particular person. In order to develop a greater sensitivity here, it is important to be aware of Submodalities, the topic of our next post.

[Interestingly, there can be cross-talk between representational systems. This is called Synesthesia, a unique condition in which people have a blending of two or more senses, and may experience things like mentally seeing specific colors or feeling certain textures when they hear specific words.]


The following video gives more detail and also makes note of other forms of body language and non-verbal communication.



Representational

Neuro Linguistic Programming Demonstration

Here the magician Derren Brown uses NLP to convince comedy actor Simon Pegg that he wanted a BMX bike for a gift when he originally wanted a leather jacket. Here Derrem elicits emotional states and anchors them with physical touch. Using these anchors, he ties the elicited states of desire to the object of a BMX Bike using what are called "embedded commands" and suggestion. Afterwards, he illustrates what he's done. It's a very amusing and informative clip.

The power of Gestures and space in nonverbal communication

The following video illustrates how effective communicators use gestures and the physical spaces around them to communicate their message at a deeper and more effective level


Illustrating the power further, this video of Hanity & Colmes interviewing a man they strongly disagree with shows us how using gestural and linguistic tactics can have the effect of exercising power over an opponent and knocking him "off balance," and also to subconsciously persuade the audience. The narrator does a good job, but he misses some more powerful and subtle tactics and (Though I don't agree with the narrator's assertion that Hannity was using satanic hand signals... though I have seen Lady Gaga intentionally do that.)
It's important to note that most people who use such tactics aren't consciously using them. Much like learning how to ride a bike, they've learned how to do it seamlessly and unconsciously by practice and modeling other people who use such tactics successfully. It's also important to realize that even though you may believe you're a very rational person, these tactics have an effect upon you at a PRE-conscious level. This is unavoidable, no matter how smart you are. Information is processed in the nervous system from the bottom up. This means that older areas of the brain which we share with our mammalian and reptilian ancestors receive and process information first, before the highly-evolved frontal lobes which make us human get a chance to process the information. By that time, the lower levels of the brain have already reacted. There is no way around this. There is only the option to train yourself to recognize what is going on and to become aware of the way your body and nervous system react.