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William James and the NLP Model
By L. Michael Hall, Ph.D."E
WILLIAM JAMES
Almost Inventor of NLP -- Part III
He almost did it-- William James almost formulated many of the distinctions that we today find in NLP: sensory-based representational systems, submodalities, meta-programs, states of consciousness, levels (primary and meta) of consciousness, etc. In this article, I want to continue this exploration of James' formulations and relate them to NLP today. Here we will look at his emphasis on will or choice, the plasticity of memory and representation, language, anchoring, "time" and time-lines, learning, and the physiology of thought.
An Empowering Decision
If you read the story of William James and the struggle that he had early in life with depression, then you will remember that classic Jamesian empowerment decision. This goes back to the moment that he decided to subscribe to the doctrine of freedom. To that decision, he dated his recover from a depression with which he had struggled. In other words, he swished himself from a limiting belief to an empowering one. In this case, he decided to run his own brain!
"I think yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will--"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts" --need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume... that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." (p. xix). From, The thought and Character of William James, Ralph Barton Perry, diary, April, 1870.
Yet because James put so much emphasis upon will, choice, decision, etc., he failed to recognize the technology that we have today in NLP, like swishing consciousness to referents so that we don't have to constantly use "will" power in keeping ourselves oriented according to our values and desired outcomes.
"Volitional effort is effort of attention. We thus find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask by what process it is that the thought of any given actions comes to prevail stably in the mind. We see that attention with effort is all that any case of volition implies. The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most 'voluntary,' is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind. Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will." (p. 317)
"To sum it all up in a word, the terminus of the psychological process in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied, is always an idea. (p. 322).
The question of fact in the free-will controversy is thus extremely simple. It relates solely to the amount of effort of attention which we can at any time put forth.
The heroic mind does differently. To it, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things. But it can face them if necessary, without for that losing its hold upon the rest of life. The world thus find sin the heroic man its worthy match and mate." (p. 326)
"'Will you or won't you have it so?' is the most probing question we are every asked; we are asked it every hour of the day and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things." (p. 327).
This comprised, for James, his decision destroyer process. He simply ran the meta-level question about his decisions, beliefs, thoughts-- "Will you or won't you have it so?"
Memory as Constructs that Inevitably Change and Grow
James frequently spoke about the very nature of memories and, in fact, made his exploration into memory one of his central themes in his search for understanding consciousness. In the following quotation, James speaks about the plasticity of memory, of the inherent constructive nature of our representations. Before Constructivism as a psychological paradigm became known, James assumed it.
"False memories are by no means rare occurrences, and whenever they occur they distort our consciousness of our Me. The most frequent source of a false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experiences. We quote what we should have said or done... and in the first telling we may be fully aware of the distinction. But ere long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns in its stead alone. This is one great source of the fallibility of testimony mean to be quite honest." (p. 73).
Language
James viewed language as part of our conceptual system. He noted that the letters of words do not typically enter our consciousness separately, as they do when we apprehended them alone. But rather a sentence flashed at once upon the eye functions as a system relative to its words. A conceptual system works to elicit in us sensible objects. In other words, a gestalt arises via words and language system so that while it begins by anchoring sensory-based representations, we then generate higher level concepts about such, and then higher concepts about that, etc.
Thus we bring conceptual understandings to lower level information and when we have disconnected data "with no conception which embraces them together, it is much harder to apprehend several of them at once, and the mind tends to let go of one whilst it attends to another." (p. 86). In other words, "mind" naturally operates and seeks to operate a meta-mind levels.
Anchoring
Noting the patterns that "mind" takes in its "movements," James talked about the principles of connection (or association), namely, coexistence, suggestion, resemblance, contrast, contradiction, cause-and-effect, means and end, genus and species, part and whole, substance and property, early and late, large and small, landlord and tenant, master and servant, etc. (p. 121).
"When two elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on re-occurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other." (p. 123, emphasis added).
He also recognized the importance of vividness in an original experience in terms of re-anchoring it later, although James talked in terms of "tracing the course of reproduction between an idea and our mood." Here he speaks about one-time learnings that get strongly anchored.
"If we have once witnessed an execution, any subsequent conversation or reading about capital punishment will almost certainly suggest images of that particular scene. Thus it is that events lived through only once, and in youth, may come in after-years, by reason of their exciting quality or emotional intensity, to serve as types or instances used by our mind to illustrate any and every occurring topic whose interest is most remotely pertinent to theirs." (p. 133).
James knew that our anchored referents not only create the categories for our thinking, he knew that they also control our states. Today in NLP we recognize that importance of "state" and state dependent learning, memory, communication, perception and behavior. In the following, we see James noting such, using the old term "temperament" for state.
"The same objects do not recall the same associates when we are cheerful as when we are melancholy. Nothing is more striking than our ability to keep up trains of joyous imagery when we are depressed in spirits. Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty, perishing, and dread afflict unremittingly the imaginations of melancholiacs. And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are high, find it impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts. In an instant the train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine and images of spring and hope." (p. 133).
"Time" and Time-Lines
As James explored "time" he noted that it did not exist as an external referent, but an internal one--as a concept. In the following quotations, he labors to identify the submodality qualify of duration in "time."
"The sensible present has duration. Notice, attend to, the present moment of time. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. An ideal abstraction, not only never realized in sense. The only fact of our immediate experience is what has been called 'the specious' present, a sort of saddle-back of time with a certain length of its own, on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time." (p. 147).
"The moment we pass beyond a very few seconds our consciousness of duration ceases to be an immediate perception and becomes a construction more or less symbolic. To realize even an hour, we must count 'now! now! now! now!' indefinitely. Each 'now' is the feeling of a separate bit of time, and the exact sum of the bits never makes a clear impression on our mind. The longest bit of duration which we can apprehend at once so as to discriminate it from longer or shorter bits of time would seem to be about 12 seconds." (p. 148).
"Thus we can no more actually perceive a duration than we can perceive an extension, devoid of all sensible content. We are inwardly immersed in what Wundt has somewhere called the twilight of our general consciousness. Our heart-beats, our breathing, the pulses of our attention, fragments of words, or sentences that pass through our imagination, are what people this dim habitat." (p. 149).
James, in this next quote, writes about the kinesthetic aspect of our "time" representation.
"Empty our minds as we may, some form of changing process remains for us to feel, and cannot be expelled. Awareness of change is thus the condition on which our perception of time's flow depends; but there exists no reason to suppose that empty time's own changes are sufficient for the awareness of change to be aroused."
Next, James reflects on the kinesthetic "feel" of time and relates it to our "time" constructs of past, present, and future. From this he even talks about a time-line--"a horizontal line" to represent the "time" concept.
"The feeling of past time is a present feeling. In reflecting on the modus operandi of our consciousness of time, we are at first tempted to suppose it the easiest thing in the world to understand. Our inner states succeed each other. They know themselves as they are. But this philosophy is too crude, for between the minds' own changes being successive, and knowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as between the object and subject of any case of cognition in the world."
"A succession of feelings, in and of itself, it not a feeling of succession. And since, to our successive feelings, a feeling of time succession is added, this must be treated as an additional fact requiring its own special elucidation. If we represent the actual time-stream or of any segment of its length by a horizontal line, the thought of the stream or of any segment of its length, past, present, or to come, might be figured in a perpendicular raised upon the horizontal at a certain point." (p. 152).
"Our intuition or immediate consciousness of pastness hardly carries us more than a few second backward of the present instant of time. Remoter dates are conceived, not perceived; known symbolically by names, such as 'last week,' 1850, or thought of by events when happened in them."
James recognized and wrote about the hypnotic phenomenon that in NLP we describe as "fast" and "slow" time.
"A time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short." (p. 150).
"The length in retrospect depends obviously on the multitudinousness of the memories which the time affords. Many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immediately widen the view as we look back. Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel up." (p. 151).
"The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older. The earlier events get forgotten, the result being that no greater multitude of distinct objects remains in the memory. A day full of excitement, with no pause, is said to pass 'ere we know it.' A day full of waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a small eternity [the structure of boredom]. It comes about whenever, from the relative emptiness of content of a tract of time, we grow attentive to the passage of the time itself. Close your eyes and simply wait to hear someone tell you that a minute has elapsed, and the full length of your leisure with it seems incredible." (p. 151).
Learning and Memory
For James, a good learning strategy involved utilizing all of the resources from all of the sense modalities, as well as setting up associations for linking things together.
"The 'secret of a good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain. ...The one who thinks over his experiences most, or weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory." (p. 161).
Why? Because he constantly goes over those items in his mind, compares them, and make a series of them. They will form for him, not so many odd facts, but a concept-system. This explains why the memory items "stick." James then applied this to effective studying versus "cramming."
"Let a man early in life set himself the ask of verifying such a theory... and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes on their stem. In a system, every fact is connected with every other by some thought-relation. The reason why cramming is such a bad mode of study is now made clear. Things learned in a few hours, on one occasion, for one purpose, cannot possibly have formed many associations with other things in the mind. Speedy oblivion is the most inevitable fate of all that's committed to memory in this way."
"Whereas the same materials taken in gradually, day after day, recurring in different contexts, considered in various relations, associated with other external incidents, and repeatedly reflected on, grow into such a system, form such connections with the rest of the mind's fabric, lie open to many pathways of approach, that they remain permanent possessions. This is the intellectual reason why habits of continuous application should be enforced in educational establishments." (p. 163)
The Physiology of "Thought"
Among one of those who first recognized the role of physiology and neurology in "thought," James posited that all consciousness involves motor factors.
"The whole neural organism, it will be remembered, is, physiologically considered, but a machine for converting stimuli in reactions; and the intellectual part of our life is knit up with but the middle or 'central' part of the machine's operations. Every impression which impinges on the incoming nerves produces some discharge down the outgoing ones, whether we be aware of it or not." (p. 237).
"We may then lay it down for certain that every representation of a movement awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its object; and awakens it in a maximum degree whenever it is not kept from so doing by an antagonistic representation present simultaneously to the mind. ... We do not first have a sensation or thought, and then have to add something dynamic to it to get a movement. Every pulse of feeling which we have is the correlate of some neural activity that is already on its way to instigate a moment." (p. 293).
Conclusion
As the "father of American Psychology," William James tremendously impacted the study of psychology. Into psychology he brought both pragmatism and phenomenology. His own pragmatic spirit caused him to ask questions of relevance and usefulness (ecology); his phenomenology of subjective experience enabled him to write in a most engaging narrative style. And, as evident in his writings, he came very close-- amazingly close--to creating many of the distinctions and facets of the NLP model.
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