NLPhilia Blog

Dr. Gretchen Berland, M.D., has been doing some marvelous research with disabled people. She mounts video cameras on their wheelchairs so as to get their own perspectives on their lives. From the New England Journal of Medicine:

Moments of extraordinary frustration were also recorded, a scene captured by [patient Vicki] Elman being a striking example. After 20 years of living with multiple sclerosis, Elman required a power wheelchair. One afternoon, her regular public-transportation service picked her up from an event, and during the ride home, her wheelchair stalled inside the van. Although it’s officially against the rules, most riders say that a driver will sometimes bring them into their homes. That day, however, Elman wasn’t so lucky. The driver parked her 10 ft from her front door, where she stayed and waited. But she had brought the video camera.

The first time I screened this tape, I was horrified. I watched Elman try to call for help on a cell phone that had no signal. I watched her wait for a car to drive by, hoping that someone would stop and help. I watched as the afternoon light faded in the background.

I wish the indignity Elman suffered that day was an isolated event, owing to one overworked bus driver. Yet the material she and Buckwalter recorded suggests otherwise. Their filmed interactions with the health care system, including telephone calls with insurance companies, visits with physicians, and exchanges with nursing aides, reveal a culture that can be both naively ignorant and, sometimes, dangerously neglectful.

Follow this link: Full article, video samples, and more information.

Powells.com has an interview with Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, author of several excellent books on language and the mind.

I’ve loved everything I’ve read that Dr. Pinker has written, starting with The Language Instinct.
Approachable and intelligent at the same time. Great stuff.

Powells.com Interviews – Steven Pinker

I just read on NLP Connections that David Grove died on January 8th. Judy Rees has more at the preceding link.

If you’re unfamiliar with David Grove’s work, you might go over to the Clean Language FAQ and learn more.

The thing I just posted on color and perception reminded me of some work I did with a friend while I was doing my first Prac training back in ’97.

She told me she hated salad because it was “just so green“, saying the word “green” with a tone of disgust and a visible shudder. I said, “There’s got to be at least one green food you like.” She thought for a second and got a look of lust in her eyes. “Key lime pie,” she said, making the words sound like phone sex.

(Now, I know, key lime pie isn’t so very green per se. Except when someone tints it. But it’s green enough to be considered green, especially by guys like me, who only see in primary and secondary colors anyway. 😉 )

All I did was help her change her submodalities of salad to those of key lime pie. Just a simple textbook swish pattern, a basic Prac skill. It took all of two minutes, including asking her for the differences between the pictures.

I’ve kept in touch with her since then, have gone out to eat with her many times, and have even taken her grocery shopping. In restaurants she frequently orders a salad, always finishes the salad even if she has to take her entree home, and tends to comment on how good they are; in the grocery store, salad fixings are always on her list. Here it is, over ten years later, and that simple swish is still doing its job.

Over at Interesting Thing of the Day there’s an interesting article on how experience in one modality can affect experience in another modality. It’s given me some insight on why they score “plating” so highly on the TV show, Iron Chef.

Color can even fool our taste buds into perceiving taste differences where none exist. This point was illustrated by a recent study that appeared in the March 2007 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, “Taste Perception: More than Meets the Tongue.” By changing both the sweetness and the color of orange juice in various increments, researchers found that test subjects ascribed a greater difference in taste between juices of different colors than they did between juices with unequal levels of sweetness.

I actually liked Crystal Pepsi. I thought it tasted lighter, not as sweet… and it didn’t bother my stomach the way most colas do. Now I have to wonder.

More detail is at The Influence of Color on Taste Perception.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Hey, they work, and we want what works, right? From Psych Central:

A survey of doctors practicing in Chicago found that 45% recommended placebos — interventions not known to have any scientific treatment effect on the problem — to patients in their clinical practice. The same doctors also said they believed in the mind-body connection.

It’s funny how they refer to “the mind-body connection,” as if the two could be separated. But at least they’re waking up to how powerful the human mind is.

Read the full article at Psych Central News.

It was a Sunday, if I recall correctly. All the offices were closed, so the building should have been empty. It wasn’t.

I was walking through the hall, rattling doorknobs. It’s one of the “trained monkey” duties a Security Officer does… one of the mindless things a well-trained monkey might be able to do, but humans have to do it because of what might be on the other side of a door that should be locked, but isn’t. Like today.

I twisted the knob and pulled, and the door came open easily. “More paperwork for me to do,” I thought, and walked in to check the suite. As the door closed behind me, around the corner ahead of me came a large, black dog. And he was most definitely not happy that I was in his house. He bared his teeth, growled deep and loud, and began running at me, eyes on my throat. He was less than a second from me. I mean it: less than one second.

I still don’t know what came over me. I adopted a happy expression, squatted down, slapped my thigh, and said in a happy tone, “Hi, fella! Come here, boy!”

It was as if the dog briefly defied gravity. He almost paused in mid-air as he ran. He stumbled ever so slightly as his feet regained the floor, and by the time he made it to me, he was barking happily, wagging his tail, dancing in circles around me, and licking my hand. Remember: less than one second.

The dog’s owner, a tall and attractive woman whom I knew worked there, came around the corner out of one of the offices. Apparently she was catching up on some work. She was looking at the two of us, the dog and me, like we were playing checkers and he was winning.

“Is this your dog?” I asked.

“Uh… yeah…” she answered. When he heard her voice, he began running rapidly back and forth between her and me, as if to say to her, “Look! Look who’s here! He finally came! Do you see?!”

“One hell of a watchdog,” I said, patting him as he ran by.

“Uh… usually…” she said. She was clearly nonplussed. Then she called the dog and went back to work.

The Psych Central Blog brings up recent research which may point the way toward a simple method for unlearning “learned helplessness“.

The researcher began with the hypothesis that rats would learn to be more adaptable in social situations, or in pairs, however, the research results revealed a very different picture. Rats that were exposed to uncontrollable conditions in pairs coped less well when they were no longer in uncontrollable situations than rats that were exposed to these situations alone.

The article goes on to say that all the researchers had to do was pair up one “learned helpless” rat with one that had never learned to be helpless, and the pair of them were able to cope with difficult situations as if the helpless little guy had never had any trouble before.

Read more at Psych Central.

We learned in our Practitioner and Master Practitioner training that metaphor is a powerful way to teach stuff. Did we get, though, that it’s a powerful tool for learning? It should go without saying, I suppose, but I didn’t really think about it until I read an article by Scott Young at Lifehack.org:

The storyteller’s art of metaphor is crucial in holistic learning. Remembering mathematical concepts is easier when you have metaphors that relate them to real life events, not just symbols and equations. Becoming a storyteller with your subjects and using powerful metaphors can make even the driest subject stick.

It’s a simple and straightforward idea: if you want to learn something, structure the lesson as if you’re teaching it to yourself using metaphor. While I’m slapping myself on the forehead, you can go over to Lifehack.org and read What Storytellers Can Teach You About How to Learn Faster. The tips on how to create a compelling metaphor are alone worth the time and effort.

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