If Your Laptop Behaved Like Your Brain You Could Be In Trouble!
When I first met my husband and I asked him if he’d heard about NLP, he merely shrugged his shoulders and said “I’m not very good at computers”. I couldn’t help but giggle.
More fool me. I use that trigger point to remind me every time I teach NLP that the name may actually be just a little bit misleading.
The word ‘programming’ naturally throws up an image of computers working through problems, or quiet people plugging away at laptops with headphones in, sitting in front of giant screens covered in code I don’t understand.
The other word ‘memory’, featuring heavily in NLP and connected techniques, is another trigger luring our thoughts into the realms of computing.
Developments in Neuroscience and NLP
In defence of those who created it, neuroscience and the information we have about the oversized walnut inside our skullcap has changed and developed dramatically since 1976. After all, NLP was invented over 40 years ago.
So, we have to think differently and include the knowledge we have in 2018. It’s important to tailor the way in which we use the techniques and how we think about the impact of those procedures on the brain.
Not So Good At Technology Me!
For those of you who know me well, you’ll appreciate that I have a particularly strong love-hate relationship with my laptop, the internet, external hard drives and technical gadgetry in general.
I’d love to suggest that the large amount of electrical activity in my brain interferes with my laptop whenever I need it to do what I want. However, I think we all know that’s not the case!
Anyway, Back To The Topic of Laptops And Brains
Allow me to give you an insight into the behaviour of the electrical raisin inside your head within the context of your laptop.
Just imagine, for a moment, that your laptop behaves in the same messy and chaotic way that our brains do.
You’ve spent all day crafting a proposal for an important client. You hit SAVE and breathe a deep sigh of relief. It’s ready for you to re-read after a good night’s sleep, make any last minute phrasing changes, and send it off tomorrow morning.
Delete, Distort & Generalise
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, you re-open your document the next morning to discover that your laptop has stored ONLY the words that it recognised from previous documents. It has also deleted a large chunk of it, because it just didn’t want to store that much information.
How important can it be to repeat yourself in the Executive Summary and the main document? Your laptop also found some of the articles you used for your research a little more interesting than the one you wrote and has cut and pasted large chunks of them into your article at random.
Your laptop made an executive decision. It decided to delete an entire section because it didn’t like the tone of your language.
We're Programmed For Fun
Your laptop also enjoyed the 20 minute time-out that you had yesterday lunchtime to refresh your mind. Your deeply helpful laptop has inserted that nice video of “How to train your dog to do yoga” right in the middle of your $100,000 sales proposal. People like things that make them laugh. Right?
As you press your up and down arrows frantically on the keyboard, the computer gets confused and throws up that processing wheel on screen with a message saying “Can you just keep it down while I think, I don’t have enough memory to process this. And, if you don’t stop, I’m going to panic and you’ll lose the entire document! ”
After a few heart palpitations, a stint in the toilet (violently splashing cold water on your face) and a calming cup of tea, you decide to tackle the problem and head back to your desk.
A Dash of Repression
As you sit down, you see the file saved message on the screen. “Did I press that button before I left?” In all the emotional overwhelm you’re not really sure if you did or not.
Isn’t it lucky that your helpful laptop, who wasn’t impressed with your reaction to it’s ‘proven’ editing has saved the file for you. Where? Well that’s the thing that’s going to be hard to determine.
Your free-thinking technical assistant has tucked it away, far from view, just in case you get upset again. Lucky you!
Your Brain Never Stops Working
What we’re really talking about here is how the brain receives, processes and what it chooses to do with information after processing.
Most of the time those decisions are made outside of your conscious awareness, based on programming you set up before you were seven years old.
Your brain is going through this process 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. Even when you’re sleeping your brain is still working. Filtering, processing and filing.
Remember This Chap?
You may remember the ‘helpful’ Office paperclip, that used to appear without request or warning and offer solutions to problems that you didn’t have and never recognise the issue you did.
I’m aware that based on what I’ve written above, you may think I would trust computers more than I trust my own brain. Well, at least more than I trust my own perception.
However, the memory of that paperclip and the constant stalking by adverts for the hotel I looked at once online, do make me somewhat nervous about getting into a self-driving car.
In fact, you’d get me into a car driven by a dog before you’d get me into a car driven by a computer. But that’s another story!
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