Any description of the way the world is, who we are or how we think, will be an accurate description of how someone has decided to chunk, pattern and categorise what they are trying to describe – but not of the ‘thing’ itself.

Modern psychology has demonstrated how the complexity of human nature and behaviour can be neatly divided up to provide the chapter headings for Psychology textbooks.

Labels such as emotion, perception, learning, memory and the unconscious provide a convenient way of talking about concepts but do not necessarily refer to specific or actual functions. As definitions they will have their own internal consistencies but as explanations they have little value. The intellectual effort in pursuing theories based on these concepts will ultimately be infertile, because the very nature of the exploration has already accepted the definition, and therefore the constraints and limitations, of the concept being explored. There can be no new understanding as a result. If you accept a position, then any results that are inconsistent with it are ignored.

Every description of the human mind, from the Cartesian Theatre, Edward de Bono’s Jelly Mould and comparisons with modern computer technology all have one thing in common – they are products of the process they are trying to describe. They are all metaphors and as such point to the process at the very heart of our thinking –

Metaphors in language are often regarded as simply a means to embellish discourse, however their function is much more significant. A metaphor is a way of thinking and a way of seeing, and a fundamental mechanism of mind. We use a metaphor when we attempt to describe one thing in terms of another. As such a metaphor will highlight certain aspects and ignore others. It cannot equally portray all elements; otherwise it would actually be the thing it describes. When we are aware of the metaphors that we that we use in our lives, what they highlight and what they hide, then we can start to explore and discover more useful metaphors to live by.

We have an experience of the world and of being alive, but we do not experience the world as it actually is. Whatever may be out there is filtered through our senses and the very processing of sensory data distorts that data. We have no idea of what we are seeing only what is represented as seen. This representation is not real, but since we have nothing to compare it against and no way of knowing how accurate it is, it acts as reality. Since we tend to seek out information that confirms what we believe, and disregard that which doesn’t, this representation, or map, conditions our senses.

Some of the latest thinking around the mind comes from George Lakoff and challenges the very presuppositions of western philosophy.

Cognitive Science was built on an aprori philosophy that had a view of the “mind” as the disembodied manipulation of meaningless formal symbols. These assumptions place substantive constraints on what a “mind” can be and if you accepted this position then all results inconsistent with it could only be seen as nonsense.

The mind, as far as Lakoff is concerned, is very much embodied.

“We are neural beings,” he says, “Our brains take in input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything – only what our embodied brains permit.”

Lakoff regards metaphor as a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the neurology of sensory-motor system to create forms of abstract reasoning. His conclusions are that the mind is inherently embodied; thought is mostly unconscious; abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

So our ability to engage in abstract reasoning appears to be limited by our body in terms of our sensory motor system - what we are able to sense and how we move is the foundation for our thinking.

Richard Bandler has commented, ‘The only way you can break your beliefs is by opening up your senses. By detecting more. Things that are outside of what you believe. You have to tramp around the outside of your own map or model of the world. Otherwise you have to live inside it and defend it ideologically.’

Since the ‘Map is not the territory’ the idea in learning and applying NLP is to become less reliant on the ‘right’ map and make better choices of maps - become ‘Map agnostic.’ Use the maps, but know what you are doing.

The model called NLP provides us with a level of description that allows us to not only recreate exceptional results from any field of human endeavour, but to use the principles behind these results to create much more.

Excellence is not enough.