NLP: How to Read People (Practice)

Continued from NLP: How to Read People (Part 2)

http://natalia-levis-fox.blogspot.ru/2014/08/nlp-how-to-read-people-part-2.html

Yesterday we learned with you how brain processes our experience. Today we shall learn how our experience manifests itself through our eyes movement. When we understand the principle, we can read people. This skill is very good in questioning (ex. in police) or in defining person’s leading modality

1. Visual (really seen or imaged)
2. Auditory (really heard or created, lies)
3. Kinesthetic  (feelings, sensations or actions)
4. Auditory  digital (inner self-talk)

 of accessing to past experience or decision-making.

Suppose the person claims that he saw some event, i.e. witnessed it, with his own eyes. Knowing how our eyes movements elicit the origin of information in brain, we can tell, if the person is telling the truth or just heard the sounds or re-tells the information from somebody else’s vision and story.

You might ask, how reliable is this method of reading people within seconds? The thing is that when we remember any experience, our eyes change their position. Each position lightens up the corresponding cortex area, where the events, feelings, sensations, sounds, words thoughts, ideas and meanings are processed (Day, 1964).

The standard NLP diagram of accessing cues (below) shows eyes positions for different types of experience in a “normally organised” right handed person.

The visual thinking draws the eyes up.

Up left – the person recalls what they saw with their own eyes.

Up right – the person creates images

(of ideal state of affairs, the way they love it)

The auditory thinking draws the eyes to the sides

To the left- the person remembers what they heard with their own ears

To the right – the person invents or creates auditory information

In case the eyes move quickly left-right (we say that eyes run)

- it is the typical case of telling lies

Note that auditory digital is placed down on the left side (suggesting that all the accessing cues on that side may correspond to the dominant hemisphere, where verbal abilities are known to be processed). In left handed subjects, this eye pattern is reversed about 50% of the time.

The kinesthetic thinking draws the eyes down to the right.

The person checks what they felt in this or that situation,

or what feelings and sensations they would experience in future.

The auditory digital (inner talk) thinking draws the eyes down to the left

The person can think about something at this moment or check what they had thought /made decision about the matter in the past

As you understand, this type of reading people has nothing in common with their ‘mind reading’, i.e. the contents of their thoughts or experience. The harm of mind reading and its origin you can discover in 2 articles from this blog at

http://natalia-levis-fox.blogspot.ru/2014/07/mind-reading-or-what-do-they-think-of-me.html

Human eyes move very quickly. So you need some practice to master the skill.

DO NOT TRY to track your own eyes movements to correspond to the general NLP pattern, common to right-handed people. You may have your own eyes movements style.

In some cases our wise nature changes the typical patterns. For instance, instead of position of auditory recall

auditory recall

your nature may insert a visual recall.

visual recall

By doing so, your wonderful nature protects you from internally hearing/perceiving information from people you hate or those, who had harmed you!

Some highly intelligent people have quite different eyes movement patterns. So you will not read them, using standard cues,

as they have direct and immediate access to information. 
They just look straight up, forward or down.

The rapid succession of movements forms people’s thinking & decision-making strategies, by which professionals (investigators, consultants, therapists, doctors, salesmen, etc) can elicit reliable information about their interlocutors.

How to master the skill of reading people by their eyes movements?

You can ‘read’ people on TV, especially interviews.

For instance, the President of Russian Federation

Vladimir Putin,

 shows the following mental strategy in his interviews before answering questions:

1. He recalls information he had seen with his own eyes (and never uses data he had heard from somebody else)

2. He checks kinesthetically, how it feels personally

3. He checks his own thoughts and opinions about matters under discussion

4. He gives the answer.

The whole process takes 1-2 seconds.

Of course, there are plenty other aspects of human communication which are left hidden from you.

But you can also master NLP with professionals in your country, city or any district. It is FUN!

If you trust my skills and competence, but live in another country, you may have home study course in NLP with me.

Learn new things. They make your life rich!

Natalia Levis-Fox,

NLP Practitioner (trained and certified by outstanding masters)

Tel.: +7 928 266 93 13

Private practice, on-line consultations

License No 314265119000560

www.natalialevisfox.com

References

1. Adler, R. “Crowded Minds” in New Scientist, Vol. 164, No. 2217, p 26-31, December 18, 1999.
2. Bandler, R. Using Your Brain For A Change Real People Press, Moab, Utah, 1985
3. Bolstad, R. and Hamblett, M. “Visual Digital: Modality of the Future?” in NLP World, Vol 6, No. 1, March 1999
4. Bolstad, R. “Putting The “Neuro” Back Into NLP” Christchurch, NZ. 2003.
5. Day, M. “An Eye Movement Phenomenon Relating to Attention, Thoughts, and Anxiety” in Perceptual Motor Skills, 1964
6. Dilts, R. Roots Of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Meta Publications, Cupertino, California, 1983
7. Dilts, R., Grinder, J., Bandler, R. and DeLozier, J. Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Volume 1 The Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience, Meta Publications, Cupertino, California, 1980.
8. Hoffman, D.D. Visual Intelligence W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998
9. James, W. The Principles Of Psychology (Volume 1 and 2), Dover, New York, 1950.

NLP: How to Read People (Part 2)

Continued from NLP: How to Read People

http://natalia-levis-fox.blogspot.ru/2014/08/nlp-how-to-read-people.html

In order to read people and understand what they ‘do’ within them about different types of experience, we must know how our brains ‘work’. For this reason, we shall use Dr Richard Bolstad’s brilliant article “Putting The “Neuro” Back Into NLP” (Bolstad, 2003).

Everything we experience of the world comes to us through the neurological channels of our sensory systems. The greatest events and the most tender interpersonal moments are "experienced" (transformed into internal experiences) as images (visual), sounds (auditory), body sensations (kinesthetic), tastes (gustatory), smells (olfactory) and learned symbols such as these words (digital). Those experiences, furthermore, can be re-membered (put together again) by use of the same sensory information.

Think of a fresh lemon.  Imagine one in front of you now, and feel what it feels like as you pick it up.  Take a knife and cut a slice off the lemon, and hear the slight sound as the juice squirts out.  Smell the lemon as you lift the slice to your mouth and take a bite of the slice.  Taste the sharp taste of the fruit.

If you actually imagined doing that, you mouth is now salivating.  Why? Because your brain followed your instructions and thought about, saw, heard, felt, smelled and tasted the lemon.  By recalling sensory information, you recreated the entire experience of the lemon, so that your body responded to the lemon you created. Your brain treated the imaginary lemon as if it was real, and prepared saliva to digest it. Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting are the natural “languages” of your brain. Each of them has a specialised area of the brain which processes that sense. Another NLP term for these senses is "Modalities". When you use these modalities, you access the same neurological circuits that you use to experience a real lemon. As a result, your brain treats what you’re thinking about as “real”.

Perception is a complex process by which we interact with the information delivered from our senses. There are areas of the neural cortex (outer brain) which specialise in information from each of the senses (or modalities as olfactory, gustatory, somatosensory, auditory and visual). However there is no direct connection between the sense organ (the retina of the eyes, for example) and the specialised brain area which handles that sense. The cortex is the outer area of the brain, and each sense has an area of cortex specialised for it.

What we see is affected by our emotions, and it also shapes those emotions. Depression, anxiety, confusion, and anger are all related to certain types of perceptual distortion. So are joy, excitement, understanding and love. For example, the person who is depressed often actually takes their visual memories of the day's experiences and darkens them, creating a gloomy world.

Take a memory of a recent experience you enjoyed, and imagine seeing it dull and grey. Usually, this doesn't feel as good, so make sure you change it back to colour afterwards.

On the contrary, if there was no emotionally coloured experience during the day or some period, you would remember nothing. We can not live without bright events and people we love. Otherwise, we would imagine continuation of stories the way it would satisfy us. Or, remember events with intensively negative connotation.

In the absence of pleasant and bright positive experience, for example, the person with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder recreates vivid and terrifying flashbacks of hurtful events to be frightened or suffer (to get intensive experience).

Some talented people construct or create bright events in their imagination to substitute the dullness and boredom of their everyday existence. Our brain does not make difference between actually seen or imagined events and people.

That is why sometimes it is not easy to distinguish reality from their created experience without knowing brain’s mechanisms functioning.

Sensory Accessing and Representational Cues

As a person goes through their daily activities, information is processed in all the sensory modalities, continuously. However, the person's conscious attention tends to be on one modality at a time. It is clear that some people have a strong preference for "thinking" (to use the term generically) in one sensory modality or another.

As early as 1890, the founder of Psychology, William James defined four key types of "imagination" based on this fact. He says “In some individuals the habitual “thought stuff”, if one may so call it, is visual; in others it is auditory, articulatory [to use an NLP term, auditory digital], or motor [kinesthetic, in NLP terms]; in most, perhaps, it is evenly mixed. The auditory type... appears to be rarer than the visual.

Person’s of this type imagine what they think of in the language of sound. In order to remember a lesson they impress upon their mind, not the look of the page, but the sound of the words....

The motor type remains -perhaps the most interesting of all, and certainly the one of which least is known. Persons who belong to this type make use, in memory, reasoning, and all their intellectual operations, of images derived from movement.... There are persons who remember a drawing better when they have followed its outlines with their finger.” (James, 1950, Volume 2, p58-61).

Research identifying the neurological bases for these different types of “thought” began to emerge in the mid twentieth century. Much of it was based on the discovery that damage to specific areas of the brain caused specific sensory problems.

By the time NLP emerged in the 1960s, then, researchers already understood that each sensory system had a specialised brain area, and that people had preferences for using particular sensory systems. In their original 1980 presentation of NLP, Dilts, Grinder, Bandler and DeLozier (1980, p 17) point out that all human experience can be coded as a combination of

internal and external vision (V),

audition (A),

kinesthesis (K)and

olfaction/gestation (O/G).

Kinesthetic external is referred to as tactile (somatosensory touch sensations) and kinesthetic internal as visceral (emotional and prioceptive).

The developers of NLP noticed that we also process information in words and that words too have a specific brain system specialised to process them, as if they were a sensory system.

They described this verbal type of information as “auditory digital”, distinguishing it from the auditory input we get, for example, in listening to music or to the sound of the wind.

In thinking in words (talking to ourselves) we pay attention specifically to the “meaning” coded into each specific word, rather than to the music of our voice.

Robert Dilts (1983, section 3, p 1-29) showed that different brain wave (EEG) patterns were associated with visual, auditory, tactile and visceral thought. The developers of NLP claimed to have identified a number of more easily observed cues which let us know which sensory system a person is using (or "accessing") at any given time.

Amongst these cues are a series of largely unconscious eye movements which people exhibit while thinking (1980, p 81). These "eye movement accessing cues" have become the most widely discussed of all the NLP discoveries. Outside of NLP, evidence that eye movements were correlated with the use of different areas of the brain emerged in the 1960s (M. Day, 1964).

In the absence of fresh impressions, positive & pleasant experience, bright meaningful events and people, persons get stuck in their preferable channels of perception and processing information, suffer and experience ‘problems’ or get encouraging information from outside sources. For instance,

Auditory digital – talk to themselves or think, think and think

Visual – see or construct images: events, people, coloring experience

Auditory – talk to other people/ ‘hear voices’ or listen music, radio, TV, etc

Kinesthetic – get self-stimulating experience watching erotic films (as simulators), race in the streets, fight, etc.

To be continued…

Natalia Levis-Fox,

NLP Practitioner

Tel.: +7 928 266 93 13

Private practice, on-line consultations

License No 314265119000560

www.natalialevisfox.com

References

1. Adler, R. “Crowded Minds” in New Scientist, Vol. 164, No. 2217, p 26-31, December 18, 1999.
2. Bandler, R. Using Your Brain For A Change Real People Press, Moab, Utah, 1985
3. Bolstad, R. and Hamblett, M. “Visual Digital: Modality of the Future?” in NLP World, Vol 6, No. 1, March 1999
4. Bolstad, R. “Putting The “Neuro” Back Into NLP” Christchurch, NZ. 2003.
5. Day, M. “An Eye Movement Phenomenon Relating to Attention, Thoughts, and Anxiety” in Perceptual Motor Skills, 1964
6. Dilts, R. Roots Of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Meta Publications, Cupertino, California, 1983
7. Dilts, R., Grinder, J., Bandler, R. and DeLozier, J. Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Volume 1 The Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience, Meta Publications, Cupertino, California, 1980.
8. Hoffman, D.D. Visual Intelligence W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998
9. James, W. The Principles Of Psychology (Volume 1 and 2), Dover, New York, 1950.