1) The external visual experience of the written material anchors, synesthetically, the kinesthetic representation of an incongruence the administrator has derived from previous testing of the material in the report.
2) The content of the feelings were such that they initiated an operation involving internal dialogue (asking herself a question) and generating images on the basis of the verbalization.
3) The constructed images were then tested against one another or against remembered images (this isn't specified directly by the administrator's behavior, nor is it particularly important for the analysis of the strategy), and an incongruence again appears, in the form of feelings, that blocks the strategy from existing.
4) Some constraint, however, prevents the individual from operating again — the first step in her operation procedure, auditory digital activity, doesn't have enough signal strength to initiate any new images ("I don't know what to say about it."') The constraints could be caused by the feelings of incongruence overriding the administrator's internal dialogue, or by interference from other representational systems bringing up time constraints, or by the need to gather more information before a successful operation may be made, or even because the present operational strategy could be ineffectual.
From the short statement made by the administrator we can determine the essential elements of her decision making strategy. These can be represented in their most elegant form as:
This shows that she typically starts with auditory digital activity, derives internal visual images from that activity, tests the images, the results of which are represented kinesthetically, and on the basis of these feelings will either exit or cycle back through the strategy. We will return to this example after a brief but important excursion into notational punctuation.
3.241 Expanding 4–Tuple Notation — Part II
At this juncture we would like to add a final set of modifiers to the behavioral calculus that we have presented so far. These modifiers have to do with the relationships between the representational components of the strategy. These modifiers distinguish whether a step in a strategy is a congruent response, polarity response, or a meta response to the step before it.
a. We will define a congruent response as essentially a continuation of the representation before it but in a different modality. A "modality" difference, here, will be constituted by a change in any of the 4–tuple modifiers we have presented so far. A switch from a visual external to a visual internal representation would constitute a modality change. So would a switch from constructed auditory experience to remembered auditory experience, or from a digital auditory representation to a tonal representation.
For example, if an individual is deciding whether or not to take a swim, he may go through a strategy in which he looks up and to the left and sees how it looked through his own eyes the last time he was swimming, in his mind's eye. A congruent response to this image in the kinesthetic system would be experiencing the body sensations of physically being in the water. A congruent response, in turn, to these body sensations in the auditory tonal representational modality would be hearing the sounds of the water lapping the edges of the pool and covering his ears as he ducks below the water surface.
We will notate a congruent response by simply using an arrow " '", to point from the initiating step to the one that is a congruent response to it. In the case of our example:
b. A polarity response will be defined as a representation which is essentially a reversal in content of the step preceding it. For instance, if the individual in the above example had made the internal image of swimming described above and, rather than experience the body sensations of being in the water, had felt frightened or nauseous, this would constitute a polarity response kinesthetically.
Note that hearing the sounds of the water of the pool following this kinesthetic experience would constitute a polarity response to the feelings. Hearing a worried tone of voice in internal dialogue would constitute a congruent response to the kinesthetic sensations.
We notate a polarity response as an arrow with a "p" beneath it between the two steps in question. Thus we would show the frightened feelings in response to the image, in this example, as:
c. A meta response is denned as a response about the step before it, rather than a continuation or reversal of the representation. These responses are more abstracted and disassociated from the representation preceding them. Getting feelings about the image (feeling that something may have been left out of the picture, for instance) that the individual had made of what it would look like to be swimming, rather than in direct response to the content of that image, would constitute a meta response in our example. Saying to himself, "I wonder if feeling this way means that I actually don't want to go swimming?" would be an internal auditory–digital meta response to these meta feelings.
We will notate the meta response modifier as an arrow between the steps with "m" beneath it, ". We would show the three steps described in the paragraph above, then, as:
Remember that these distinctions are purely a matter of punctuation — of how a particular strategy step is related to the steps around it. A representation which constitutes a meta response to one step may constitute a congruent response or a polarity response to some other step (and vice versa) even though it is the exact same representation. These modifiers are not the result of physiological differences in neural structures or processes, as are the other modifiers we have presented. That is, there is no separate portion of our neurology set aside for congruent, polarity or meta responses. The significance of these distinctions is purely in relation to the steps that provide the context in which the representation occurs; they provide information about the relative contents of the representations in the strategy.
As with all of the modifiers presented, we strongly suggest that you only employ these distinctions when they are important or useful to achieving the outcome you are attempting to secure.
These distinctions are the least rigorously defined and identifiable of those we have presented in this book. They can, however, be extremely useful to you at times in identifying patterns of behavior. For instance, you may notice that someone will consistently have a kinesthetic polarity response to verbal directions (Aed,t) from external sources, but a congruent response if she gives herself the directions with her own internal dialogue in her own tone of voice (Aid,t), even if it is exactly the same words she heard externally. Some people will have great difficulty in making decisions because their strategy involves a long string of meta responses, each about the step that has come before it, so they never get around to directly confronting the issues involved because they are caught up in their own processes. Conversely, other people who only respond with congruent responses may experience themselves as having no choices, because they can never think about what they are doing until after they have already gone through the behavior.