Placebo

I met with my NLP practice group this week and we had a good debate about the concept that:

* NLP change processes won't work unless you want them to - No clinical validity

* NLP doesn't work if you don't want it to - Clinical validity in the negative

So we had a chat about the placebo effect. In psychology the placebo effect has been clinically proven. You can give someone a sugar tablet for pain, and as long as they think it works (and usually if the chemist thinks so too - a double blind study) there will be a physiological pain reduction. Why? Because the brain controls all your pain. The pain is not in the finger that you've burned, it is in the signals in the brain, carried from the nerves in your finger. So the brain says "you've burned your finger, right we'll send a pain signal there and that'll get all the juices flowing that fix pain in the body". So if you trick your brain and manage to convince it that the burn doesn't hurt anymore, it will switch off the pain signals and tell the fixing juices to stand down.

So you can lie to your brain! And I think this is where the unconscious comes into all of this. It may feel very weird on a practitioner course to "talk to your unconscious and ask it to communicate with you" but essentially, the only way you can trick your brain, is by getting underneath the processing systems and getting right into the root of the chemical interactions going on in there.

That's the power I want out of NLP. I want to be able to undermine my cognitive patterns and get a grip on the soft underbelly of decision making. Imagine the power you would have over your body if you could in effect control it. When people say "we only use 10% of our brain capacity" what they actually mean (even if they don't know it) is that the other 90% is given over to the processes that run our organs, that control our breathing, and make our hearts beat. Think about it, even when you're asleep, 90% of your brain is keeping those machines going like clockwork, recognising any pattern change and adjusting the rest of the body to match. Fascinating stuff isn't it?

So maybe I'm over-thinking NLP, but I like to process what I can see working. And if I can understand the placebo effect, then I can apply the same principle to change processes!



Reference: mark-rayan-pua.blogspot.com