Richard Bandler - Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Man: What's the difference in the cerebral hemispheres as to the dominant hand and dominant eye?

Each time we do a seminar someone asks us that question. As far as I can tell, there is no research to substantiate the idea that there is eyed-ness. You won't find any research that is going to hold up. Evenif there were, I still don't know how it would be relevant to the process of interpersonal communication, so to me it's not a very interesting question. Your eyes are split so that half of each eye is connected to each hemisphere. The tendency to look in a microscope with one eye or another has been noted as statistically significant; however, I don't know of any use for that information right now.

Man: What about a situation where one eye is measurably much better visually? One is practically blind and the other one is OK. Is there any correlation there with the handedness?

I don't know. I have no idea. Again, I've never found that a useful organizing principle in communication. If you know of something in that area, let me know about it.

Man: At what age do you assume that human beings establish hand dominance?

I don't. No assumptions. Linguists claim that it occurs somewhere around four and a half. I have no basis on which to substantiate that. Handedness is a dimension of experience which I know exists in the world, I have never found any useful connection to communication. There is an infinite amount of sensory experience available right here in this room. We consistently make unconscious choices about what we sample. If we didn't, we'd all be "idiot savants," who can't forget things; they can't not know things. When you ask them about anything, they have to give you a complete "dump" of all the information they have ever had on that particular topic.

Most therapy is founded on the presupposition that if you know how things came about, the roots where it all originated, that will give you a basis from which to change it. I believe that that's an accurate and limiting assumption. Yes, that is one way to go about changing, but it is only one out of an infinite number of ways to understand behavior. When people achieve handedness is in no way significant, as far as I can tell, in the process of doing therapy and communication unless what you really want to do is to teach children to be differently handed.

The only thing I've ever used handedness in is stuttering. That's the only time I've ever used it face-to-face, experientially with a kid to assist him in getting more choices. I simply noticed that if he were given a task in which it was specified he do it with this hand as opposed to that hand—and it didn't matter which hand—and he didn't have to talk simultaneously, he could do the task and then describe it. If he had to talk at the same time, or if the task involved both hands, so that there was hemispheric switching, he had difficulty.

Children do have accessing cues at a very young age, and that is relevant information to notice. There is something now that they are imposing upon children called "learning disabilities." Many of these "learning disabilities" are really functions of the educational system. For example, I was given a bunch of children who fell into the classification of "crossed hemispheres" and they told me that this was something that existed in the world. They wanted me to find out if there was any difference between these children and the rest of them, given accessing cues and so on. What I discovered is that they were all children who were trying to spell auditorily. When I said "How do you spell the word 'cat'?" they went inside and their eyes moved down and to their left. I asked the children what they were doing and they said "Sounding the word out," because they were taught to spell phonetically. You can't even spell "phonetics" phonetically!

Who here is a good speller? Somebody who used to win spelling bees? How do you spell the word "phenomena"?

Woman: I read it.

She sees it, she reads it, whichever word you use to describe it. Now, as you visualized the word "phenomena" you somehow knew that was correct. Now, change the "ph" to an "f" and tell me what changes in your experience as you see it with an "f" instead of a "ph."

Woman: It stops being a word.

It stops being a word. How do you know that it stops being a word? What experience do you have?

Woman: It makes the whole rest of the word fall apart in my visual—

The letters literally drop off and fall?

Woman: Yeah, they sort of fuzz out and disappear.

There are two steps to spelling. One is being able to visualize the word, and the other is having a system by which to check the accuracy. Try something for me. Can you see the word "caught"? OK, go ahead and leave it up there and change the "au" to "eu" and tell me what happens.

Woman: It became "cute," and it's changed its spelling. Did anybody who was near her notice what her response was? What did she do?

Woman: She winced.

I said change it to "eu" and her shoulders rolled forward, her head tipped back, and she winced. There was a change in her feelings right here at the mid-line of the torso. No matter what language we've operated in, what country we've been to, no matter what the language is, good spellers have exactly that same formal strategy. They see an eidetic, remembered image of the word they want to spell, and they know whether or not it's an accurate spelling by a kinesthetic check at the mid-line. All the people who tell us they are bad spellers don't have that strategy. Some bad spellers make eidetic images, but then they check them auditorily. Others make constructed visual images and spell creatively.

Knowing this, a question we could then ask is "Well, how is it that some children learn to spell visually with a kinesthetic check, and other children learn to spell in other ways?" But to me that's not nearly as interesting a question as "How do you take the child who is a bad speller and teach him to use the same strategy that a good speller uses?" When you do that, you will never need to teach children to spell. They will learn automatically if you teach them an appropriate process, instead of content.

Man: How about adults? Can you teach adults?

No, it's hopeless. (laughter) Sure you can. Let me address that question in a slightly different way. How many here now see clearly that they are visually oriented people? How many people see that? How many people here feel that they are really kinesthetically oriented people in their process? Who tell themselves that they are auditory? Actually all of you are doing all of the things we're talking about, all the time. The only question is, which portion of the complex internal process do you bring into awareness? All channels are processing information all the time, but only part of that will be in consciousness.

At seminars like this, people always go out at lunch time and try to figure out what they "are," as if they are only one thing, thereby stabilizing everything pathologically. People try to figure out what they "are" instead of using that information to realize that they have other choices. People will come up to me and say "I'm really confused about this representational stuff because I really see myself as being a very feeling person." That's a profound utterance, if you think about it. I've heard that maybe a hundred and fifty times. How many people have heard something like that already this morning? Rather than thinking of yourself as being visually oriented, kinesthetically oriented, or auditorily oriented, take what you do best as a statement about which system you already have well-developed and refined. Realize that you might put some time and energy into developing the other systems with the same refinement and the same fluidity and creativity that you already have in your most developed system. Labels are traps, and one way that you can stabilize a piece of behavior in an unuseful way is to label it. Instead, you can take the fact that you notice most of your behavior falls into category X, to let yourself begin to develop your skills in Y and Z.

Now, I'd like to caution you about another thing. In psychotherapy one of the major things that Freud made fashionable, and that has continued unconsciously as a presupposition of most therapists' behavior, is the phenomenon known as introspection. Introspection is when you learn something about behavior, you apply it to yourself. I would like to caution you not to do this with most of the material we are presenting you, because you will simply go into a loop. For example: How many people here who can visualize easily know what they would look like if they weren't visualizing? ...

If you do that, you get a spinning sensation. How many of you during the exercise were paying attention to the feeling of your own eyes moving up and down? That's an example of introspection and it is not useful to do it to yourself in this context. These tools are mostly for extrospection, sensory experience. They are things to detect in other people. If you use it on yourself, all you will do is confuse yourself.

Man: How well does this pattern of accessing cues hold up in other cultures?

There is only one group that we know of that is characteristically organized differently: the Basques in the Pyrenees of northern Spain. They have a lot of unusual patterns, and that seems to be genetic rather than cultural. Everywhere else we've been—the Americas, Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa—the same pattern exists in most of the population. It may be a neurological bias that is built into our nervous system as a species.

Woman: Do people who are ambidextrous have any different patterns?

They will have more variation from the generalization that we have offered you. For example, some ambidextrous people have the visualization reversed and not the auditory and the kinesthetic, or vice versa.

It's really interesting to me that the percentage of left-handed and ambidextrous people in the "genius" category in our culture is much higher than the percentage in the general population. A person with a different cerebral organization than most of the population is automatically going to have outputs which are novel and different for the rest of the population. Since they have a different cerebral organization, they have natural capabilities that "normally organized" right-handers don't automatically have.

Woman: You talked earlier about children who spelled badly because they did it auditorily, and that you could teach them how to do it visually. And now you just talked about the auditory or ambidextrous person having something different that makes him unique. I'm wondering if it's worth the energy it takes to make those kids be able to do what other people do more easily if it's taking away from other things that they can do?

If I teach a child how to spell easily, I'm not taking anything away. Choices are not mutually exclusive. Many people close their eyes in order to be in touch with their feelings, but that's just a statement about how they organize themselves. There's no necessity to that. I can have all the feelings that I want with my eyes open. Similarly, if I have an ambidextrous or left-handed person with a different cerebral organization, I don't have to destroy any choices they presently have to add to that. And that's our whole function as modelers. We assume since you all managed to scrape up whatever amount of money it cost you to come here, that you are competent, that you already are succeeding to some degree. We respect all those choices and abilities. We're saying "Good, let's add other choices to those choices you already have, so that you have a wider repertoire" just as a good mechanic has a full tool box.