From the previous blogs of perceptions and the Map is Not the Territory, we have seen that we learn from our past experiences, and that we react to the world with the filters we used store the information and the filters we use to access and use that information. Our beliefs, culture, religion, language.
To understand how we communicate, use language and behaviour, let us see how we process information.
EXTERNAL INFORMATION From the external environment we are fed information about the world about us.
SENSORY FILTERS This information passes through or accepted by our sensory modalities, these are known in NLP as V,A,K,O,G, being Visual, Auditory (hearing and speech), Kinesthetic (touch, feelings, both internal and external), Olfactory (smell), and Gustatory (taste).
INTERNAL PROCESSING How we pass information from one modality to another and process the information in our brain.
INTERNAL STORAGE How we store the information, how do we represent the information in our mind.
ITERNAL RETRIEVAL This is known as the Transderivational Search, how do we access the information.
INTERNAL REPRESENTATION How we filter the resultant information.
FEEDBACK How the resultant information affects our behaviours and feedback, verbal and non verbal.
So, often in communication, the spoken or written form, the sender will miss out a lot of information. For example, “it rained yesterday” is enough to convey a concept of the action of raining, but we say this is at the surface structure, there is a lot of missing information, i.e. how heavy did it rain, at what time, where, for how long, etc.
The listener has to go inside to recover from their experiences examples that will fill in the blanks, the missing information. This searching is called the Transderivational Search. The listener has to go into the deeper structure to get complete understanding.
In usage we will see that when a communication is made and:-
The referential index is missing, that is the person to whom the metaphor or story is missing, then the listener will go to their deeper structure, substituting their own self, their own situation to make an understanding. Milton Erickson was the master of using metaphors when working with clients.
If the predicate, violates the referential index, ie, the car felt good as it won the race, the car can not have feeling so the listener will most likely to substitute themselves into the situation to feel good.
If part of the sentence, the deep structure, has been eliminated, the listener will go on the Transderivational Search to find a suitable situation. ie You are satisfied. The listener will substitute by what, how satisfied.
If a predicate is changed into a noun or in NLP terms a nominalisation, again the listener will go on the Transderivational Search, to find an understanding. In the above example the predicate satisfy becomes a nominalisation satisfaction. So the sentence could become You find satisfaction. The listener has to go to their deep structure to understand satisfaction.
See blog on the META MODEL (click)