Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE - Richard Bandler

Most psychologists think it's hard to communicate with crazy people. That's partly true, but it's also partly a result of what they do with crazy people. If someone is acting a little strange, he is taken off the streets, pumped full of tranquilizers and put in a locked barracks with thirty others. They observe him for 72 hours and say, "Gosh, he's acting weird." The rest of us wouldn't act weird, I suppose.

How many of you have read the article "Sane People in Insane Places"? A sociologist had some healthy, happy, graduate students admit themselves to mental hospitals as an experiment. They were all diagnosed as having severe problems. Most of them had a lot of trouble getting out again, because the staff thought their wanting to get out was a demonstration of their illness. Talk about a "Catch–22"! The patients recognized that these students weren't crazy, but the staff didn't.

Some years ago when I was looking around at different change methods, most people considered psychologists and psychiatrists to be experts on personal change. I thought many of them were much better demonstrations of psychosis and neurosis.

Have you ever seen an id? How about an infantile libidinal reaction–formation? Anybody who can talk like that has no business calling other people nuts.

Many psychologists think catatonics are really tough, because can't get them to communicate with you. They just sit in the same position without even moving until someone moves them. It's actually very easy to get a catatonic to communicate with you. All you have to do is hit him on the hand with a hammer. When you lift the hammer to hit him again, he'll pull his hand away and say, "Don't do that to me!" That doesn't mean he's "cured," but he's now in a state where you can communicate with him. That's a start.

At one time I asked local psychiatrists to send me the weird clients they were having difficulties with. I found out that really weird clients are easier to work with, in the long run. I think it's easier to work with a flaming schizophrenic than it is to get a "normal" person to stop smoking when he doesn't want to. Psychotics seem to be unpredictable, and seem to flip in and out of their craziness unexpectedly. However, like anything else that people do, psychosis has a systematic structure. Even a schizophrenic doesn't wake up one day as a manic–depressive. If you learn how that structure works, you can flip him in and out. If you learn it well enough, you can even do it yourself. If you ever want to get a room in a full hotel, there's no better way than by having a psychotic episode. But you better be able to get back out of the episode again, or the room you get will be padded.

I've always thought that John Rosen's approach to psychosis was the most useful: enter the psychotic's reality and then spoil it for him. There are a lot of ways you can do this, and some of them aren't obvious. For instance, I had one guy who heard a voice coming out of electrical outlets, and the voice forced him to do things. I figured if I made his hallucinations real, he wouldn't be schizophrenic any more. So I hid a speaker in an outlet in my waiting room. When he came into the room, the outlet said "Hello.". The guy turned around and looked at it and said, "You don't sound the same."

"I'm a new voice. Did you think there was only one?"

“Where did you come from?"

"Mind your own business."

That got him going, Since he had to obey the voice, I used that new voice to give him the instructions he needed to chance what he was doing. Most people get a handle on reality and respond to it. When I get a handle on reality, I twist it! I don't believe that people are broken. They have just learned to do whatever they do. A lot of what people have learned to do is pretty amazing, and frankly I see more of that outside of mental hospitals than inside.

Most people's experience is not about reality, it's about shared reality. There are people who come to my door and give me religious comic books, and tell me the world is going to end in two weeks. They talk to angels, and they talk to God, but they're not considered crazy. But if a single person is caught talking to an angel, he is called crazy, taken to a mental hospital and stuffed full of drugs. When you make up a new reality, you'd better be sure that you get some friends to share it, or you may be in big trouble. That's one reason I teach NLP. I want to have at least a few others who share this reality, so the men in white coats don't take me away.

Physicists also have a shared reality. Other than that, there really isn't a lot of difference between being a physicist and being a schizophrenic. Physicists also talk about things you can't see. How many of you have seen an atom, let alone a subatomic particle? There is a difference: physicists are usually a little more tentative about their hallucinations, which they call "models" or "theories." When one of their hallucinations is challenged by new data, physicists are a tiny bit more willing to give up their old ideas.

Most of you learned a model of the atom that said there is a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, with electrons flying around the outside like little planets. Niels Bohr got the Nobel prize for that description back in the 1920's. Over a period of about 50 years that model was the basis for an immense number of discoveries and inventions, such as the plastic in those Naugahyde chairs you're sitting on.

Fairly recently, physicists decided that Bohr's description of the atom is wrong. I wondered if they were going to take back his Nobel prize, but then I found out Bohr is dead, and he already spent the money. The really amazing thing is that all the discoveries that were made by using a "wrong" model are still here. The Naugahyde chairs didn't disappear when physicists changed their minds. Physics is usually presented as a very "objective" science, but I notice that physics changes and the world stays the same, so there must be something subjective about physics.

Einstein was one of my childhood heroes. He reduced physics to what psychologists call "guided fantasy," but which Einstein referred to as a "thought experiment." He visualized what it would be like to ride on the end of a beam of light. And people say that he was academic and objective! One of the results of this particular thought experiment was his famous theory of relativity.

NLP differs only in that we deliberately make up lies, in order to try to understand the subjective experience of a human being. When you study subjectivity, there's no use trying to be objective. So let's get down to some subjective experience. . . .

II. Running Your Own Brain

I'd like you to try some very simple experiments, to teach you a little bit about how you can learn to run your own brain. You will need this experience to understand the rest of this book, so I recommend that you actually do the following brief experiments.

Think of a past experience that was very pleasant — perhaps one that you haven't thought about in a long time. Pause for a moment to go back to that memory, and be sure that you see what you saw at the time that pleasant event happened. You can close your eyes if that makes it easier to do. ...

As you look at that pleasant memory, I want you to change the brightness of the image, and notice how your feelings change in response. First make it brighter and brighter. . . . Now make it dimmer and dimmer, until you can barely see it. ... Now make it brighter again.

How does that change the way you feel? There are always exceptions, but for most of you, when you make the picture lighter, your feelings will become stronger. Increasing brightness usually increases the intensity of feelings, and decreasing brightness usually decreases the intensity of feelings. How many of you ever thought about the possibility of intentionally varying the brightness of an internal image in order to feel different? Most of you just let your brain randomly show you any picture it wants, and you feel good or bad in response.

Now think of an unpleasant memory, something you think about that makes you feel bad. Now make the picture dimmer and dimmer. ... If you turn the brightness down far enough it won't bother you any more. You can save yourself thousands of dollars in psychotherapy bills.

I learned these things from people who did them already One woman told me that she was happy all the time; she didn't let things get to her. I asked her how she did it, and she said "Well, those unpleasant thoughts come into my mind, but I just turn the brightness down."

Brightness is one of the "submodalities" of the visual modality. Submodalities are universal elements that can be used to change any visual image, no matter what the content is. The auditory and kinesthetic modalities also have submodalities, but for now we'll play with the visual submodalities.

Brightness is only one of many things you can vary. Before we go on to others, I want to talk about the exceptions to the impact brightness usually has. If you make a picture so bright that it washes out the details and becomes almost white, that will reduce, rather than increase, the intensity of your feelings. Usually the relationship doesn't hold at the upper extreme. For some people, the relationship is reversed in most contexts, so that increasing brightness decreases the intensity of their feelings.

Some exceptions are related to the content. If your pleasant picture is candlelight, or twilight, or sunset, part of its special charm is due to the dimness; if you brighten the image, your feelings may decrease. On the other hand, if you recalled a time when you were afraid in the dark, the fear may be due to not being able to see what's there. If you brighten that image and see that there's nothing there, your fear will decrease, rather than increase. So there are always exceptions, and when you examine them, the exceptions make sense, too. Whatever the relationship is, you can use that information to change your experience.

Now let's play with another submodality variable. Pick another pleasant memory and vary the size of the picture. First make it bigger and bigger, . . . and then smaller and smaller, noticing how your feelings change in response. . . .

The usual relationship is that a bigger picture intensifies your response, and a smaller picture diminishes it. Again there are exceptions, particularly at the upper end of the scale. When a picture gets very large, it may suddenly seem ridiculous or unreal. Your response may then change in quality instead of intensity — from pleasure to laughter, for instance.

If you change the size of an unpleasant picture, you will probably find that making it smaller also decreases your feelings. If making it really big makes it ridiculous and laughable, then you can also use that to feel better. Try it. Find out what works for you.

It doesn't matter what the relationship is, as long as you find out how it works for your brain so that you can learn to control your experience. If you think about it, none of this should be at all surprising. People talk about a "dim future" or "bright prospects." "Everything looks black." "My mind went blank." "It's a small thing, but she blows it all out of proportion." When someone says something like that, it's not metaphorical; it's usually a literal and precise description of what that person is experiencing inside.

If someone is "blowing something out of proportion," you can tell her to shrink that picture down. If she sees a "dim future," have her brighten it up. It sounds simple, . . . and it is.

There are all these things inside your mind that you never thought of playing with. You don't want to go messing around with your head, right? Let other people do it instead. All the things that go on in your mind affect you, and they are all potentially within your control. The question is, "Who's going to run your brain?"

Next I want you to go on to experiment with varying other visual elements, to find out how you can consciously change them to affect your response. I want you to have a personal experiential understanding of how you can control your experience. If you actually pause and try changing the variables on the list below, you will have a solid basis for understanding the rest of this book. If you think you don't have the time, put this book down, go to the back of the bus, and read some comic books or the National Enquirer instead.

For those of you who really want to learn to run your own brain, take any experience and try changing each of the visual elements listed below. Do the same thing you did with brightness and size: try going in one direction . . . and then the other to find out how it changes your experience. To really find out how the your brain works, change only one element at a time. If you change two or more things at the same time, you won't know which one is affecting your experience, or how much. I recommend doing this with a pleasant experience.

1. Color. Vary the intensity of color from intense bright colors to black and white.

2. Distance. Change from very close to far away.

3. Depth. Vary the picture from a flat, two–dimensional photo to the full depth of three dimensions.

4. Duration. Vary from a quick, fleeting appearance to a persistent image that stays for some time,

5. Clarity. Change the picture from crystal–clear clarity of detail to fuzzy indistinctness.

6. Contrast. Adjust the difference between light and dark, from stark contrast to more continuous gradations of gray.

7. Scope. Vary from a bounded picture within a frame to a panoramic picture that continues around behind your head, so that if you turn your head, you can see more of it.

8. Movement, Change the picture from a still photo or slide to a movie.

9. Speed. Adjust the speed of the movie from very slow to very fast.

10. Hue. Change the color balance. Increase the intensity of reds and decrease the blues and greens, for example.

11. Transparency. Make the image transparent, so that you can see what's beneath the surface.

12. Aspect Ratio. Make a framed picture tall and narrow . . . and then short and wide.

13. Orientation. Tilt the top of that picture away from you . . . and then toward you.

14. Foreground/background. Vary the difference or separation between foreground (what interests you most) and background (the context that just happens to be there). . . . Then try reversing it, so the background becomes interesting foreground. (For more variables to try, see Appendix I)

Now most of you should have an experience of a few of the many ways you can change your experience by changing submodalities. Whenever you find an element that works really well, take a moment to figure out where and when you'd like to use it. For instance, pick a scary memory — even something from a movie. Take that picture and make it very large very suddenly. . . . That one's a thrill. If you have trouble getting going in the morning, try that instead of coffee!