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
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