By paying close attention to accessing cues and the non–verbal portions of people's behavior, you can pick up a vast wealth of information that most often passes by people's conscious attention and defies their abilities to verbalize. The behavioral accessing cues that an individual employs to tune his or her neurology to single out one particular representational system through which to accept and process some input at a particular point in time, will provide you with an excellent index with which to identify the representational system being employed for a particular strategy step. These cues will directly indicate the representational system they are being used to access. This becomes very useful when the rapid and complex representational sequences that make up some strategies are not available through the verbal report of the individual who has displayed the strategy.
In this book we will be detailing only a few of an endless range of possible indicators and accessing mechanisms, all of which are available to your ongoing sensory experience. By paying attention to the systematic and recurrent behaviors that people go through as they communicate and act, we have discovered a number of non–verbal cues which may be used to index the sensory specific processes people run through during behavioral activity. These include eye position, tonal and tempo qualities of the voice, breathing rate and position, skin color changes, body temperature, heart rate, posture and muscle tonus, even EEG activity.[21] The two basic principles that underly our method of classification are:
a) Any occurrence in one part of a system (such as the neurological and biological system that makes up a human being) will necessarily affect all of the other parts of that system in some way. When the patterns of interaction between the parts of the system are identified, the effects of the different parts of the system on one another can be predicted and utilized.
b) In humans, all behavior (macro–and micro-) is a transform of internal neurological processes, and therefore carries information about those processes. All behavior, then, is in some way communication about the neurological organization of the individual — a person can't not communicate.
The goal of this process of information gathering is the goal of all of behavioral science, to decode the overt transforms of neurological strategies, which are generally not available to the consciousness of those in whom they operate, in order to gain understanding of how the representational components are organized with respect to one another.
The process of discovering regularities between an individual's observable behavior and their internal processes is an example of the process we have employed to generate all of our models of behavioristic. Gregory Bates on has elegantly formalized some of the properties of this process in his work:
"If from some perception X, it is possible to make better than random guesses about some Y, there is 'redundancy' between X and Y, 'X is a coded message about Y\ or 'Y is a transform of X', or 'X is a transform of Y' …" ("Reality and Redundancy" — 1975)
"… when an observer perceives only certain parts of a sequence or configuration of phenomena, he is in many cases able to guess, with better than random success, at the parts which he cannot immediately perceive (guessing that a tree will have roots, for example)." (Steps to an Ecology of Mind— 1973)
Note that this definition says nothing of statistical verification. Statistics may support or reveal patterns but they do not establish them; nor do they determine whether a pattern will be useful or not. Statistical averaging may sometimes be used to help find a pattern, but the statistics themselves are not the pattern, as they are often assumed to be. Indeed, the behavior we are studying becomes established, not on the basis of statistical averages, but on patterns. The child learning to speak does not assimilate the language by taking statistical averages of the meanings of words s/he is learning to use, but rather on the basis of the patterns offered by relatives, friends and others as the child grows up. The overwhelming majority of children become competent native speakers of the language they learn in this way.
The patterns and generalizations we offer concerning accessing cues can be and have been supported by experimental research, but we have chosen simply to present these generalizations and patterns as we have observed them in the more useful context of our professional experience. We will present no numbers, tables or graphs.
The ultimate success of a neurolinguistic programmer will depend on the ability to observe, identify and utilize the multitude of transforms and patterns that will be constantly offered to you in your ongoing sensory experience by the members of our species; not on the ability to measure and average types of behavior or to remember numbers and tables. We offer the generalizations in this book as a way to assist you to begin the process of expanding your own perceptual abilities, not as "laws". We suggest that you develop a strategy with which to observe these patterns in your ongoing interactions and verify them for yourself until you have incorporated the strategy so thoroughly that you can let it drop out of consciousness. In our experience, the patterns we offer have held for every individual we have observed and questioned.
3.231 Eye Movements as Accessing Cues.
We have noticed that the eye movements people make as they are thinking and processing information provide a remarkably accurate index for sensory specific neurological activity. We introduced these patterns in Patterns II:
"When each of us selects the words we use to communicate to one another verbally, we typically select those words at the unconscious level of functioning. These words, then, indicate which portions of the world of internally and externally available experience we have access to at that moment in time. More specifically, the set of words known as predicates (verbs, adjectives and adverbs) are particularly indicative. Secondly, each of us has developed particular body movements which indicate to the astute observer which representational system we are using. Especially rich in significance are the eye scanning patterns which we have developed. Thus, for the student of hypnosis, predicates in the verbal system and eye scanning patterns in the non verbal system offer quick and powerful ways of determining which of the potential meaning making resources — the representational systems — the client is using at a moment in time, and therefore how to respond creatively to the client. Consider, for example, how many times you have asked someone a question and they have paused, said "Hmmmmm, let's see" and accompanying this verbalization they move their eyes up and to the left. Movement of the eyes up and to the left stimulates (in right handed people) eidetic images located in the non dominant hemisphere. The neurological pathways that come from the left side of both eyes (left visual fields) are represented in the right cerebral hemisphere (non dominant). The eye scanning movement up and to the left is a common way people use to stimulate that hemisphere as a method for accessing visual memory. Eye movements up and to the right conversely stimulate the left cerebral hemisphere and constructed images—that is, visual representations of things that the person has never seen before (see Patterns, volume I, page 182).
21
One of the authors of this book, Robert Dilts, has conducted research involving EEG and representational systems. Specifically, he examined the correlations between the primary, or most highly valued, representational system and the baseline EEG patterns of the individual, with their eyes alternately opened and closed. Although the research has primarily involved two pilot studies, and the methodology still needs improvement, it has shown a startling relationship between the most highly valued representational system and baseline EEG patterns.
Baseline EEG description: Low amplitude beta (over 16 Hz) activity when subject's eyes are open and subject is at rest. Spindles of alpha waves (8–12 Hz) appear when the subject closes his or her eyes.
Primary representational system: Visual.
Baseline EEG description: High amplitude beta activity with some intermitant alpha activity whether eyes are open or closed.
Primary representational system: Auditory.
Baseline EEG description: Low amplitude beta whether eyes are open or closed.
Primary representational system: Kinesthetic (tactile–motor)
Baseline EEG description: High amplitude alpha waves, whether the subject's eyes are open or closed.
Primary representational system: Kinesthetic (visceral)
The following are generalizations of these patterns for EEG surface electrodes placed over the occipital (visual) cortex of the subjects:
