An overview and a little bit about language and the brain for NLP practitioners
Neurologists and anatomists must have had great fun thinking up names for the structures they described. Remember it this way: understanding is not about being able to recall all the names and dates or list charts cited in textbooks. As I used to say to my history teacher, all I really need to know is which book those charts are in, can’t we learn something more useful yet?
We all know that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, but how many of us know what it was actually about?
Do this: make two fists and put them together. That is approximately the size of your brain. Each hand represents one hemisphere.
The brain can be divided anatomically in several ways. One division most people are familiar with is the two hemispheres. These hemispheres demonstrate largely contralateral control, meaning the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body and vice versa. This is not universally true, and exceptions exist, but it is a useful generalisation.
General functions of the left hemisphere include:
- Control of the right side of the body
- Dominant perception and production of non-emotional language: reading, writing, spelling, speaking, grammar, and syntax
- A sense of time
- Rhythm
The left hemisphere is often described as the communication hemisphere, this is true for most, though not all, people.
One patient I once nursed had sustained a severe injury to the left hemisphere of his brain (we will look at the specific region later). He lost the use of his right arm and leg, and the right side of his face drooped slightly. While the facial weakness improved over time, the arm and leg did not.
Characteristic of left-hemisphere injury, he became aphasic and could produce only a single syllable. That syllable consisted of four letters (“fuck”) and was expressed exclusively during moments of frustration or anger – of which there was considerable opportunity for a gentleman facing semi-paralysis and near-total mutism.
Thus, this gentleman’s entire communicative repertoire became variations of:
“Fuck… fuck… fuckfuckfuckfuck!!!”
Staff at the rehabilitation centre rapidly attuned their ears to variations in pitch, tone, speed, volume, duration, and rhythm – assigning meaning to what had become an essentially analogical form of communication.
Spot the submodalities? Pay attention to these distinctions, they are really, really important. More on that later.
Now, why could he only communicate via “fuck-ing” when in an emotional state?
Some of the core functions of the right hemisphere include:
- Control of the left side of the body
- Emotion
- Pressured speech / babytalk
- Sexual drives
Patients in this position are often reduced to single-syllable utterances that reflect emotional, aggressive, or sexual content.
And no, this condition is not the same thing as Tourette’s syndrome.
The two hemispheres communicate with each other via a fantastically named structure: the corpus callosum.
In the past, some neurologists severed this band of nerve fibres to treat certain forms of epilepsy by localising seizures to a single hemisphere. Given that the corpus callosum contains over 300 million fibres connecting corresponding regions of each hemisphere, the procedure was a remarkably bold intervention.
This procedure, a commissurotomy, produced some very interesting results, depending on your point of view.
Neurologist V. S. Ramachandran reports an extraordinary example of what might be termed a “spontaneous commissurotomy” in a 59-year-old woman:
More than fifty years ago, a middle-aged woman walked into the clinic of Kurt Goldstein, a world-renowned neurologist with exceptional diagnostic skills. She appeared entirely normal and conversed fluently. Nothing seemed amiss, except for one extraordinary complaint.
Every now and then, her left hand would fly up to her throat and attempt to strangle her. She often had to restrain it with her right hand, wrestling it back down to her side, much like Peter Sellers portraying Dr Strangelove. On occasion, she even had to sit on the murderous hand, so intent was it on ending her life.
Now a question for you:
A client arrives and says, “I try not to worry. I tell myself I should be happy and grateful, but I cannot help feeling this awful resentment.”
Which hemisphere is doing which part?
My aim for NLP practitioners is to enable you not only to hear modality and submodality distinctions but also to detect which parts of the brain are active during the sequencing of strategies, processes, and meta-programmes, and to structure your interventions accordingly.
Remember: everything you need to know about your client is right there in front of you (assuming you are in the same room). It is simply a matter of having the appropriate referential experiences to hear it.