So on one hand, we have what we say about what we do, and on the other hand, we have what we actually do. Generally these are short on resemblances, especially in the significant details, which really tend to make the difference. If this was not true, there would be no such thing as a field of psychology, since the implication of such an area of study is that there are aspects of the psyche, and of behavior, that need close study.
Note, as well, that after thousands of years of documented study, there are continuous refutations of positions formed just a decade or so before. Not only does it seem as though we've made little progress, but it also seems as though we continue to not do so.
That is why, when we come to need a practical model to decipher our behavior, or the behavior of others, so that we can make use of it, and build upon it, we generally have to rely on metaphors of some sort. Some metaphors are more useful than others in this domain, because there is a methodology for their use. Others seem more plausible because of parallels in other fields. For instance, Robert Dilts, another big-time NLP guru, designed a metaphor called Neurological Levels, loosely based on Gregory Bateson's reinterpretation of Bertrand Russell's "set theory."
According to set theory any set of elements cannot be a part of itself. For instance if there is a set called X, and Y and Z are are the elements of the set (i.e. X = {Y, Z}), then no way can either Y or Z be equal to X. That would be an illogical recursion, or something like that. A set, therefore, is on a higher order level than its elements, or rather, a higher logical level.
A system, for instance, is on a higher logical level than the elements of the system, just as it is often much more complex in behavior than its elements. Another way something can be on a higher logical level is if it is about something else. For instance, an explanation is on a higher logical level than the thing that's being explained. There can also be an explanation of the explanation, and so forth, i.e. theories about theories about theories. This isn't as complicated as it sounds, or it might be, but it's also much more common than you think. Anytime you say something like "I like what you said about that book," you are making a statement about a statement about a statement. In some ways it can be a very powerful way of thinking, since it allows you to, not only make choices about what you are thinking, and how, but also about how you think about how you think about something, and so forth.
It can also be dangerous, if you confuse levels of abstractions with others. A common trait of schizophrenia, for instance, is confusing a metaphor for the real thing, in other words, "flattening the abstract into the concrete." For instance, if one said something like, "you're poisoning me with your ideas," it can be a joke, or it can mean that certain of the ideas the other is expressing are irritating the speaker. But a schizophrenic may actually believe that the words spoken contain a lethal substance, which affects oneself physically. To some degree, we may all fall for this fallacy, but we have the reality testing abilities to negate it for the most part.
In Dilts' Neurological Levels, it is assumed that the higher levels somehow rule the levels beneath them. For instance, his hierarchy is:
A. Identity
B. Beliefs/Values
C. Capabilities
D. Behaviors
E. Environment
Therefore, Identity determines Beliefs and Values, which determines Capabilities, which determine Behaviors, which controls, to some extent, the environment. The chain of causality in the model is a bit more complex than can be handled in this space, but one should at least be able to understand how beliefs and values are a part of identity, and how behaviors can be determined by what one is capable of.
While it is arguable (and sometimes argued) that their are logical inconsistencies with the model, people have found it useful for explaining parts of human experience for practical purposes.
Kenneth Burke, a notable literary critic, who later became interested in analyzing actually communication and social systems, developed an analytical system which on first glance has nothing in common with Dilts' model. What is often described as his theory of Dramatism, uses the following categories to study communication behavior, or, as he puts it, Symbolic Action: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency and Purpose.
It just so happens, however that there is a strange correspondence between Dilts' and Burke's systems:
Dilts -- Burke
Identity = Agent
Values/Beliefs = Purpose
Capabilities = Agency
Behavior = Act
Environment = Scene
What does this have to do with work? Nothing. But anytime I see a parallel between two completely different sets of ideas, I think, right away, that there must be some underlying structure, whether innate, or cultural, which I've just bumped up against. In this case, I feel that either set of categories can be useful for thinking about your experience at work, and at play, whether you'd rather use the metaphor of the theater, or mathematical inclusion. Why not use both, in that case, since the opportunity is there to arrive at a binary coupling, from which a third set of your own can be derived. And how would that enable you to change the way you think about what you do?
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
"Sleights of Mind"
Here is an interesting NY Times article from which you can infer some of the difficulty one may have in describing one's own mental process. Part of the problem is that the left lobe of the brain specializes in making up explanations, but even more basic than that are "the limits of cognition and attention."
Still, it is possible to create something useful out of what we can patch together, guess at, experiment with. It is not necessary to create actual tracings of reality, only a useful map.
And in constructing such a thing you are doing something similar to making art, to begin with. But what will give your efforts the integrity it needs to be useful is working at and learning the craft.
Still, it is possible to create something useful out of what we can patch together, guess at, experiment with. It is not necessary to create actual tracings of reality, only a useful map.
And in constructing such a thing you are doing something similar to making art, to begin with. But what will give your efforts the integrity it needs to be useful is working at and learning the craft.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Following the Curve II
Part of the reason our detailed descriptions for subjective experience can sound so surreal is because there really isn't any language to describe that class of experience. Another reason is that it takes the minute gestures of thought apprehending itself in midstream, kind of like using a microscope to study itself. In a sense, it just wasn't built to do this type of work.
It also belies a quality of sensory experience that many of us may consider from time to time, though we don't often comprehend the consequences: that the senses do not in fact take in and represent for us a completely uninterpreted representation of the external world. Color, for instance, doesn't exist outside of what is made possible by the structure of the eye, and the calculations of the neurological system. What comes in through the eye is only a collection of information that our bodies need resort and reorganize in order to construct the images we recognize. Depending on what we are paying attention to, and how we are thinking, the information will be distorted differently. In particularly extreme situations, even time can be shorted and lengthened dramatically, as when one is in an accident, or are responding to an emergency.
To a certain extent, even language can further influence, not only what arrives from our senses into conscious awareness, but also how the shapes images, sounds, et al, are packaged before they make there way to the brain, through the pre-arranged sensory grids cultivated by language, such as geometric shapes, for instance, which get sent forward from the brain into ocular receptors, or get trained into the sensory motor system as patterns to filter for.
In short, our senses and nervous systems do not represent the world for us as it is, but in ways that may be useful for us, the same way mathematical formulas do not give us the world as it actually is, but in a way that we can predict and act upon it.
Since we need to rely on the same systems to describe what we are doing when we think and act as we do to think and act, it is impossible to represent what we are actually doing. But we can track some of the qualities of this behavior, and use them to delineate patterns that can be reused, and combined with others. Early in the history of NLP, the originators and developers came up with the notion of "strategy elicitation," in order to create models of what people do internally to produce the results they do. For instance, by using this methodology, they found out what made good spellers different from bad spellers, and could then teach the bad spellers how to do the same.
While tracking mental processes through a sequence of sensory modalities has its obvious limitations, it can often be useful to extract simple curves, which are often clustered together to create more complex models.
From another perspective, Jonathan Altfeld has used his knowledge and experience in Expert Systems (a field within Artificial Intelligence) to create a methodology based on Boolean IF/THEN logic, which he calls, Knowledge Engineering-TM, that is adaptable to more complex systems, and parallel streaming. The content of IF/THEN statements, or rules, can be very open ended, and can be made of multiple rules themselves, and may run on multiple logical levels (i.e. there can be rules about rules, and rules that can be guided by higher level rules).
All of these systems have been invented, and didn't exist out in the world, per se. The point I'm trying to make is that a symbolic system, outside of ordinary language, is often useful for doing this kind of work, so that one may keep a record of what one does, and when. Once you have a record of what you do when you are playing music, for instance, you can then experiment with using some of the same patterns, or appropriately altered, in other contexts, such as one's day job.
If I were to quickly summarize Jill's writing experience (see previous post) in terms of NLP Strategies, I would say that she begins with the visual experience of staring at the blank screen (Ve -- visual-external). The absence of anything on the screen allows her to begin paying attention to feelings in a particular way (Ki -- kinesthetic-internal), which she mutates through an experience of synesthesia to an imaginary sound (Ai -- auditory-internal), which lines up through some other type of process (needs further elicitation) with words and word phrases (Ad -- auditory-digital), which she will type onto the screen. The notation would look something like this: Ve->Ki->Ai->Ad. Just knowing this much is often enough to replicate the pattern in another person, or in the same person in a different context.
A more complete model will, of course, bring into consideration the sensation, both visual and kinesthetic, of spreading herself outwards past the boundaries of her body, as it will also take into account the feedback produced in the tactile sensations of keying the words into the computer, as well as that of the images apearing on the screen. Perhaps the word images influence the internal imaging she is using to guide the semantic aspect of her writing. This may sound rather complex, but we are talking about things that occur within fractions of a second, and that will continual to cycle, in a pure process sense, over and over again, though the content can change, and the results can be infinitely varied.
Which brings up the issue of quality control, which is often guided by a strategy, or strategies, of its own.
For almost everything you will want to do, you will never need to get as complex as the above implies, though depending on how precise you need to be, the degree of complexity can grow exponentially. In the end, you will weed out almost everything and leave only the most relevant details. It is usually best to remain simple, unless completely necessary. Sometimes it's something as simple as a single link or two that can make a huge difference across contexts, as can be inferred from reading about the spelling strategy.
It also belies a quality of sensory experience that many of us may consider from time to time, though we don't often comprehend the consequences: that the senses do not in fact take in and represent for us a completely uninterpreted representation of the external world. Color, for instance, doesn't exist outside of what is made possible by the structure of the eye, and the calculations of the neurological system. What comes in through the eye is only a collection of information that our bodies need resort and reorganize in order to construct the images we recognize. Depending on what we are paying attention to, and how we are thinking, the information will be distorted differently. In particularly extreme situations, even time can be shorted and lengthened dramatically, as when one is in an accident, or are responding to an emergency.
To a certain extent, even language can further influence, not only what arrives from our senses into conscious awareness, but also how the shapes images, sounds, et al, are packaged before they make there way to the brain, through the pre-arranged sensory grids cultivated by language, such as geometric shapes, for instance, which get sent forward from the brain into ocular receptors, or get trained into the sensory motor system as patterns to filter for.
In short, our senses and nervous systems do not represent the world for us as it is, but in ways that may be useful for us, the same way mathematical formulas do not give us the world as it actually is, but in a way that we can predict and act upon it.
Since we need to rely on the same systems to describe what we are doing when we think and act as we do to think and act, it is impossible to represent what we are actually doing. But we can track some of the qualities of this behavior, and use them to delineate patterns that can be reused, and combined with others. Early in the history of NLP, the originators and developers came up with the notion of "strategy elicitation," in order to create models of what people do internally to produce the results they do. For instance, by using this methodology, they found out what made good spellers different from bad spellers, and could then teach the bad spellers how to do the same.
While tracking mental processes through a sequence of sensory modalities has its obvious limitations, it can often be useful to extract simple curves, which are often clustered together to create more complex models.
From another perspective, Jonathan Altfeld has used his knowledge and experience in Expert Systems (a field within Artificial Intelligence) to create a methodology based on Boolean IF/THEN logic, which he calls, Knowledge Engineering-TM, that is adaptable to more complex systems, and parallel streaming. The content of IF/THEN statements, or rules, can be very open ended, and can be made of multiple rules themselves, and may run on multiple logical levels (i.e. there can be rules about rules, and rules that can be guided by higher level rules).
All of these systems have been invented, and didn't exist out in the world, per se. The point I'm trying to make is that a symbolic system, outside of ordinary language, is often useful for doing this kind of work, so that one may keep a record of what one does, and when. Once you have a record of what you do when you are playing music, for instance, you can then experiment with using some of the same patterns, or appropriately altered, in other contexts, such as one's day job.
If I were to quickly summarize Jill's writing experience (see previous post) in terms of NLP Strategies, I would say that she begins with the visual experience of staring at the blank screen (Ve -- visual-external). The absence of anything on the screen allows her to begin paying attention to feelings in a particular way (Ki -- kinesthetic-internal), which she mutates through an experience of synesthesia to an imaginary sound (Ai -- auditory-internal), which lines up through some other type of process (needs further elicitation) with words and word phrases (Ad -- auditory-digital), which she will type onto the screen. The notation would look something like this: Ve->Ki->Ai->Ad. Just knowing this much is often enough to replicate the pattern in another person, or in the same person in a different context.
A more complete model will, of course, bring into consideration the sensation, both visual and kinesthetic, of spreading herself outwards past the boundaries of her body, as it will also take into account the feedback produced in the tactile sensations of keying the words into the computer, as well as that of the images apearing on the screen. Perhaps the word images influence the internal imaging she is using to guide the semantic aspect of her writing. This may sound rather complex, but we are talking about things that occur within fractions of a second, and that will continual to cycle, in a pure process sense, over and over again, though the content can change, and the results can be infinitely varied.
Which brings up the issue of quality control, which is often guided by a strategy, or strategies, of its own.
For almost everything you will want to do, you will never need to get as complex as the above implies, though depending on how precise you need to be, the degree of complexity can grow exponentially. In the end, you will weed out almost everything and leave only the most relevant details. It is usually best to remain simple, unless completely necessary. Sometimes it's something as simple as a single link or two that can make a huge difference across contexts, as can be inferred from reading about the spelling strategy.
Following the Curve
For the most part, people who do things well will make something up if you ask them to tell you how they do things. A few people will tell you that they don't know, and that would be a more honest answer. This is because most of what we do is so automated, made up of innumerable learning experiences layered on top of each other, compressed and streamlined, that most of it happens too quickly and beneath the surface of consciousness. But that doesn't mean it's not possible to back into it.
Think of just one thing that you do. Keep it as simple as possible. I will illustrate will a fictional example, but something could very well be a curve, a cluster of curves, or as Jonathan Altfeld describes as a system of rules or beliefs.
Jill sits down at her desk and flips on her PC and then her word processing software. She stares at the black screen and begins to daydream about what she might want to write today. She turns her attention toward her mid-section and the feelings she has in that area, and those spreading outward toward her arms, her fingertips, and begins hearing what they may be as voices, murmuring wordless, at first. She barely notices the sensation, partially visual, partial somatic, of part of her self flooding outward toward her sides and back, a kind of hallucination that she is filling the room, and that here identity is getting mixed with the surround objects. She can almost feel the phone, which is several feet away, and monitor seems to grow larger before her. As she begins tapping on the keyboard the sensations in her chest stream out into her fingertips and the murmuring becomes one word, or a phrase of words, as she types.
While this description may sound as though it boarders on madness, or just science fiction, it is similar to what some people do when they write. This description is actually a composite of parts of how a few people have described their process. When we do different types of work, we use our senses differently. It is very similar to someone going into a trance. It actually is a trance, but a self-induced trance state that one learns to induce through trial and error. Call it meditation, if you will.
Later we will learn how to interpret the process and how to utilize it in other areas of our lives.
Think of just one thing that you do. Keep it as simple as possible. I will illustrate will a fictional example, but something could very well be a curve, a cluster of curves, or as Jonathan Altfeld describes as a system of rules or beliefs.
Jill sits down at her desk and flips on her PC and then her word processing software. She stares at the black screen and begins to daydream about what she might want to write today. She turns her attention toward her mid-section and the feelings she has in that area, and those spreading outward toward her arms, her fingertips, and begins hearing what they may be as voices, murmuring wordless, at first. She barely notices the sensation, partially visual, partial somatic, of part of her self flooding outward toward her sides and back, a kind of hallucination that she is filling the room, and that here identity is getting mixed with the surround objects. She can almost feel the phone, which is several feet away, and monitor seems to grow larger before her. As she begins tapping on the keyboard the sensations in her chest stream out into her fingertips and the murmuring becomes one word, or a phrase of words, as she types.
While this description may sound as though it boarders on madness, or just science fiction, it is similar to what some people do when they write. This description is actually a composite of parts of how a few people have described their process. When we do different types of work, we use our senses differently. It is very similar to someone going into a trance. It actually is a trance, but a self-induced trance state that one learns to induce through trial and error. Call it meditation, if you will.
Later we will learn how to interpret the process and how to utilize it in other areas of our lives.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Ingredients of Craft
I've just about finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. It finally came out in paperback, and was discounted 20%, so I thought it was time to dip in. Like so many other things I've read over the past few years, its main gist is how the unconscious mind can be trained to make complex choices and evaluations, given the right experiences. This should not be a surprise to anyone who's paid more than a minimal attention to processes of learning, for instance anyone who has had children, and who has watched them learn to walk, to speak, wield silverware without hurling bits of food in a broad and undefined radius, or who has recently had necessary learning crunches of their own, and suddenly found what was once agonizing become near effortless.
According to Gladwell, part of the trick, along with having numerous learning occasions to draw upon, is limiting the information that is available to what is truly relevant, and using this smaller subset to discern useful patterns. What turns out to be relevant, however, is not always so obvious. It is also not so obvious which information is less than useful, and what may actually pollute the process. He makes an example of how many more women were hired to play for symphony orchestras once a screen was used to blot out visual information. Evidently, a formidable appearance would make lesser players sound better. For many conductors, seeing a woman would make the playing sound weaker, less robust, though the same conductor might hear quite a different performance from behind the screen.
Any of you who have practiced a craft, somewhat well, or who have survived working, even "done well for yourselves," whatever that might mean, have learned to make complex judgments on the unconscious level, just like some of the experts in Gladwell's book, or those modeled by Bandler and Grinder & Co. You may not have developed an expertise to the level of Milton Erickson, Yo-Yo Ma or a Michael Jordan, but you can speak the language, read people to enough to survive, or to understand what they want or expect from you and meet those expectations to a degree. Otherwise, you'd be nowhere.
There is a class of people who think they are responsible for everything, who believe they have all the magical skills that make the earth spin on its axis, and who believe they should be treated special for it. There was an article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about them. A few CEOs thought that their skill sets were so extraordinary that they should be rewarded anything the might possibly demand.
I'm not even going to comment on that. All I can say is I've been in some organizations whose leadership has dragged them through fairly sudden and intensive reorganization, obviously not having the slightest idea what they were doing, and I have witnessed near miraculous response from unknown people on many levels. I've seen these people do what I thought was impossible, or at least unreasonable, without even appreciating what it was they had done, themselves. If you're not paying attention to the details, it is very easy to imagine that you're accomplishing magic just by willing it to occur.
You might build things, or you might sit in a cubicle sifting through information. You might help people deal with their alcoholic siblings, design cartoon characters, haul refuse, check IDs at dance clubs; whatever you do, you have the job you do because you do it better than others would. There are an infinite number of micro-skills (curves) you are probably overlooking.
A pianist, for instance, in order to produce something we generally recognize as music, has to have a tremendous amount of control over the speed and pressure she applies to each of the keys, the time she waits between pressing each key, the recognition of intervals between notes, harmonies and discordances among notes played together, or overlapping. And all of this knowledge must be coordinated across the entire nervous and endocrine systems, the muscular and skeletal systems, since musical patterning is as much biological and chemical as it is mechanical and aural.
If you were to study the patterns of an experienced trash collector, you'd find something on the order of black belt neuro-physical skills. How else would such a person be able to endure long hours of lifting and dumping without destroying his or her body and leaving more of a mess behind than he found. It's extraordinary, the precision and coordination needed to maintain oneself over time, not to mention the intuitive knowledge one must have of objects in motion, which might very well surpass those of a college level physics professor. These are things we generally take for granted.
According to Gladwell, part of the trick, along with having numerous learning occasions to draw upon, is limiting the information that is available to what is truly relevant, and using this smaller subset to discern useful patterns. What turns out to be relevant, however, is not always so obvious. It is also not so obvious which information is less than useful, and what may actually pollute the process. He makes an example of how many more women were hired to play for symphony orchestras once a screen was used to blot out visual information. Evidently, a formidable appearance would make lesser players sound better. For many conductors, seeing a woman would make the playing sound weaker, less robust, though the same conductor might hear quite a different performance from behind the screen.
Any of you who have practiced a craft, somewhat well, or who have survived working, even "done well for yourselves," whatever that might mean, have learned to make complex judgments on the unconscious level, just like some of the experts in Gladwell's book, or those modeled by Bandler and Grinder & Co. You may not have developed an expertise to the level of Milton Erickson, Yo-Yo Ma or a Michael Jordan, but you can speak the language, read people to enough to survive, or to understand what they want or expect from you and meet those expectations to a degree. Otherwise, you'd be nowhere.
There is a class of people who think they are responsible for everything, who believe they have all the magical skills that make the earth spin on its axis, and who believe they should be treated special for it. There was an article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about them. A few CEOs thought that their skill sets were so extraordinary that they should be rewarded anything the might possibly demand.
I'm not even going to comment on that. All I can say is I've been in some organizations whose leadership has dragged them through fairly sudden and intensive reorganization, obviously not having the slightest idea what they were doing, and I have witnessed near miraculous response from unknown people on many levels. I've seen these people do what I thought was impossible, or at least unreasonable, without even appreciating what it was they had done, themselves. If you're not paying attention to the details, it is very easy to imagine that you're accomplishing magic just by willing it to occur.
You might build things, or you might sit in a cubicle sifting through information. You might help people deal with their alcoholic siblings, design cartoon characters, haul refuse, check IDs at dance clubs; whatever you do, you have the job you do because you do it better than others would. There are an infinite number of micro-skills (curves) you are probably overlooking.
A pianist, for instance, in order to produce something we generally recognize as music, has to have a tremendous amount of control over the speed and pressure she applies to each of the keys, the time she waits between pressing each key, the recognition of intervals between notes, harmonies and discordances among notes played together, or overlapping. And all of this knowledge must be coordinated across the entire nervous and endocrine systems, the muscular and skeletal systems, since musical patterning is as much biological and chemical as it is mechanical and aural.
If you were to study the patterns of an experienced trash collector, you'd find something on the order of black belt neuro-physical skills. How else would such a person be able to endure long hours of lifting and dumping without destroying his or her body and leaving more of a mess behind than he found. It's extraordinary, the precision and coordination needed to maintain oneself over time, not to mention the intuitive knowledge one must have of objects in motion, which might very well surpass those of a college level physics professor. These are things we generally take for granted.
Whether the discussion is about work, or something you do for pleasure, there are more curves at play than you can possibly count. It might be in your better interest, therefore, to discover those that are more useful in either category, and expand upon them, nurture and experiment with them. The easy part is that they are often set in motion by sensory definable cues, such as imagery, sounds, scents and feeling.
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