Perception, Subjectivity and Reality

An important concept in NLP, and in other psychological and philosophical theories, is that we construct our experience of the outside world by piecing together snippets of information gathered by our senses.

Because there is far too much information available, we have to reduce it down in order to make sense of it. Just go into any busy room and try to listen to every conversation at the same time to experience the potential sensory overload that we all face, every moment of every day. Even if you're sitting somewhere quiet right now, there is a huge amount of information that your brain is filtering out. For example, can you notice the temperature of the air? What can you see around you that is red? How do your feet feel? What sounds can you hear?

Even our senses, which are concerned with the reception of information, don't have access to all the potential information that exists in the world. We can only see and hear in a very narrow range of frequencies that coincide with the characteristics of sunlight and air. Our sense of smell is generally rather poor. We cannot directly sense magnetic or electrical fields, ultra-violet light or the rotation of the Earth, yet the limited information that is available to us is still too much to cope with.

In order to reduce this overwhelming amount of information so that we can focus on what's important, our brain uses three filtering processes.

The first filter deletes anything that is not within our focus of attention. It's also influenced by our beliefs, for example allowing your car keys to disappear before your eyes when you are convinced that you've misplaced them.

The second filter distorts the world so that it appears how you think it should be. For example, if there is someone at work who you can't stand talking to, you probably distort the way their voice sounds. You have probably also distorted many of your memories to exaggerate how they feel to you.

The final filter generalises information and forms rules. We couldn't survive without generalising. Our ancestors couldn't test every sabre toothed tiger to see if they were all dangerous, and we don't want our children to wonder whether every road that they cross is dangerous or not.

These sensory filters form our perceptions and most people, most of the time, confuse their perceptions with reality. A lifetime of perceptions create what you know through the processes of comprehension, and your experiences form your attitude and personality, which drive your behaviour.

Your behaviour influences and changes the outside world, which feeds back in through your senses.

Therefore, your senses are not a one way street; they are part of a continuous flow of information from the outside world into your mind and from your mind back to the outside world through your thoughts, words and actions.

In NLP, we often refer to this lifetime's collected experience as a person's 'map', taken from the saying that "the map is not the territory".

When a person's map differs significantly from the territory, the outside world, they cannot function effectively. They are unable to deal with the unexpected and they particularly struggle to make sense of and relate to other people. Physical objects are reasonably reliable and constant, but people are ever changing and growing, and so our 'map' of other people must be open to changing and growing too.

And if that's not already a lot to take in, consider this. If you were to calculate the resolution of your eyes in the same way that you would for a digital camera, you would discover that your eyes are physically incapable of resolving enough detail to even read these words. So how are you able to see in such detail? Clearly, vision is more than just a physical process...

Imagine using a satellite navigation system that had a map that was ten years out of date. Where would it take you? Dead ends? Would it take you through congested town centres rather than round the bypass? Would it take you on narrow country lanes instead of a new motorway?

It might sound like an impossible example, yet the reality is even worse. People have driven the wrong way on Motorways because their 'sat nav' told them to do a 'U turn'. The number of accidents involving trucks stuck under bridges has increased because of 'sat nav' systems with incorrect information. One man even followed his 'sat nav' when it instructed him to drive over a bridge. The bridge was, in fact, a car ferry and the man drove his car off a quayside. It's difficult to understand how these drivers couldn't see that the 'sat nav' was wrong. It's hard to believe that they couldn't just use their own eyes. Yet we all do this, every time we rely on our own out of date maps and choose to ignore the information that the outside world is giving us.

Many NLP techniques simply recover the information lost within this filtering process so that a person can update their map of the world, gaining more useful perceptions and behaving more appropriately and effectively in situations that they previously found difficult to manage or control.

When people do 'wake up to reality', they often do so with a shock, yet it doesn't have to be that way. NLP gives us a set of tools and techniques that help us to update our maps so that we can live more in the real world and enjoy meaningful and satisfying relationships with the people we share it with.