NLPhilia Blog

Once again, we find Milton Erickson was ahead of his time:

A new study adds an unexpected method to the list of ways to spur memories about our past: body position. That’s right: just holding your body in the right position means you’ll have faster, more accurate access to certain memories. If you stand as if holding a golf club, you’re quicker to remember an event that happened while you were golfing than if you position your body in a non-golfing pose.

Cognitive Daily: Body position affects memory for events

My S/O pointed me to news of a free telephone session with hypnotist John Morgan. Check out the postscript on this post on the Grasshopper Notes Blog:

I am offering a FREE Hypnosis session via conference call this Thursday night, April 24th at 9 PM EDT and you’re invited. Did I mention the session is FREE? The call is limited to 100 people.

The actual post is pretty cool, too.

It’s been going on far too long: Doug O’Brien is one of the best-kept secrets in NLP and hypnosis training. So I’m shouting his name from the blogtops. His certification training in Ericksonian Hypnosis is coming to New York City!

Learn the fundamentals of Ericksonian Hypnosis, become certified as a Hypnotherapist and get started in a fascinating and lucrative new field … In just two intensive weekends

Now, just in case you’re saying you aren’t interested in pursuing hypnosis as a career, let me say this: the career part is entirely optional and a brief segment of the course, but the skills you will acquire are mandatory. Wouldn’t you love to be a master of hypnotic language, capturing and leading the attention of others easily and smoothly, creating and delivering powerful stories, no matter what you do?

It’s May 16, 17, & 18 and May 31 & June 1, 2008. Don’t put it off; go sign up straight away!

Doug is also training with Jonathan Altfeld in Tampa in June: Belief Craft and NLP Master Practitioner.

Get more of Doug at http://ericksonian.com and http://ericksonian.info.

I just received a message from Doug O’Brien saying that Dave Dobson died the morning of the 22nd.

I never got to train with Dr. Dobson and I deeply regret that. We’re all fortunate that excellent people like Doug O’Brien and Barb Stepp are able to keep his work going. Few people realize what an impact Dave’s OTCC model had (and still has) on NLP. Rest in peace, Dave.

Read more at Barb Stepp’s site: RIP David R. Dobson, PhD, 22 February 2008

Scott Adams, over in The Dilbert Blog, recently asked his readers for nonsense. He considered the idea that most song lyrics today are nonsense, and he wanted his readers to write a hit song.

Looks like it worked.

Next time you’re creating an induction, remember this.

Here’s some cool research on subliminals:

Subliminal messages–messages that are processed by our brains but never reach our consciousness–really do influence attitudes and behavior, according to a new study.

However, some subliminal messages may have an opposite effect than expected. For example, exposing people to a subliminal image of a national flag moderates rather than intensifies their political attitudes.

Go check out the rest of The Influence of Subliminal Messages at Psych Central News.

Doug O’Brien has some really good news: Dr. Stephen Gilligan has submitted an article to his newsletter.

The article contributed today by Dr. [Stephen] Gilligan is an edited transcript of his opening remarks at a 12-day “Trance Camp” held near Hamburg, Germany, in January 2007. (The transcript of the entire workshop will soon be published in a book entitled, “Generative Trance.”) In this article Dr. Gilligan contrasts traditional hypnosis with Erickson’s approach to hypnosis and psychotherapy. He also gives us insight into what he terms “generative trance,” defined as “an opportunity to deeply accept every part of your life in ways that allow amazing new learnings and developments to unfold.”

Go read the Ericksonian Approaches Newsletter.

I was listening to an audiobook today, as I try to do every day, and heard a neat phonological ambiguity. The book was “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, a 600-year-old tale from England which has been translated by Simon Armitage from Middle English into Modern English. Armitage does a wonderful job of using alliteration (which is to Middle English poetry what rhyme is to modern poetry) to recapture the “flavor” of the old language, and the reader (British actor Bill Wallis) is brilliant as well. (Wallis even reads the entire book in Middle English after he finishes with the Modern English translation.)

Anyway… I heard something like “…threw him into the copse” and immediately had a funny mental image of throwing a guy into a bunch of police officers. If you don’t know what a “copse” is, don’t be surprised; we rarely use the word anymore. I was surprised that I did know what it was.

So we have:

• cops, simple present tense of “to cop”, as in “to illicitly obtain”: “He cops a feel whenever he goes out with a girl.”
• cops, simple present tense of “to cop”, as in “to arrest”: “Officer O’Reilly cops at least one drug dealer every shift he works.”
• cops, plural of “cop” as in “police officer”: “If you fart like that one more time, I’m going to call the cops and have you arrested for attempted murder.”
• copse, a “bunch of bushes”: “Your kitten is hiding in that copse over there.”

Looking for more possibilities, Google led me to this wonderful resource: Suber & Thorpe, “An English Homophone Dictionary”. It’s no longer maintained, but wow… it’s loaded with goodies.

Incidentally, the audiobook seems to be unavailable from amazon.com. I got my copy from my public library. It’s published by BBC Audiobooks America and can be ordered by way of this link. The printed book is available from your favorite bookseller.

In a recent BoingBoing post referring to a study of computer-altered celebrity photographs done at the University of Central Lancashire, it was pointed out that we tend to recognize a person from caricature twice as easily as from a photograph.

I wonder how this could be useful in, say, state elicitation, memory recovery, and changework.

Link to article in The Guardian

Barbara Stepp just mentioned in her newsletter, Stepp’s for Better Living, that there may be another OTCC training with Dave Dobson coming up:

If Dave is up to it we may be doing something with OTCC and NFP in Friday Harbor in the spring. We will let you know as soon as we know.

Watch this space, or visit Barbara’s site to subscribe to her newsletter.