Overview of representational systems

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At the core of NLP is the belief that, when people are engaged in activities, they are also making use of a representational system; that is, they are using some internal representation of the materials they are involved with, such as a conversation, a rifle shot, a spelling task. These representations can be visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or involve the other senses. In addition, a person may be creating a representation or recalling one. For example, a person asked to spell a word may visualize that word printed on a piece of paper, may hear it being sounded out, or may construct the spelling from the application of a series of logical rules. (pp.138-139)

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According to NLP, for many practical purposes mental processing of events and memories can be treated as if performed by the five senses. For example, Einstein credited his discovery of special relativity to a mental visualization strategy of "sitting on the end of a ray of light", and many people as part of decision-making talk to themselves in their heads.

The manner in which this is done, and the effectiveness of the mental strategy employed, is stated by NLP to play a critical part in the way mental processing takes place. This observation led to the concept of a preferred representational system, the classification of people into fixed visual, auditory or kinesthetic stereotypes. This idea was later discredited and dropped within NLP by the early 1980s, in favor of the understanding that most people use all of their senses (whether consciously or unconsciously), and that whilst one system may seem to dominate, this is often contextualized - globally there is a balance that dynamically varies according to circumstance and mood.

NLP asserts that for most circumstances and most people, three of the five sensory based modes that seem to dominate in mental processing:

• visual thoughts - sight, mental imagery, spatial awareness
• auditory (or linguistic) thoughts - sound, speech, dialog, white noise
• kinesthetic (or proprioceptive) sense - somatic feelings in the body, temperature, pressure, and also emotion.

The other two senses, gustatory (taste) and olfactory (smell), which are closely associated, often seem to be less significant in general mental processing, and are often considered jointly as one.

For this reason, one often sees the term VAK in NLP reference texts, to signify these three primary representational systems, as well as the term 4-tuple (or VAKOG) if the author wishes to include all senses including taste/smell. The same term is also known as First Access (John Grinder)or primary experience (Freud).

Notation and strategies

In documenting mental strategies and processing by the senses, NLP practitioners often use a simple shorthand for different modalities, with a letter indicating the repreentation system concerned, and often, a superscript to indicate how that system is being used. Three key aspects are commonly notated: The representation system being used (visual/V, auditory/A, kinesthetic/K, and occasionally, O/G), whether the direction of attention is internal ⁽ⁱ⁾ or external ^(e), and whether the event is a recollection of an actual past event ^(r) or construction of an imaginary event ^(c). Due to its importance in human cognitive processing, auditory internal dialogue, or talking in one's head, has its own shorthand: A^id.

Putting these together, this is a very simplified example of some steps which might actually be involved in replying to a simple question such as "Do you like that dress?":

Step	Activity	Notation	What it's being used for
1	auditory external	Ae	Hear the question
2	visual internal	Vi	picture to oneself the meaning of the question
3	visual external	Ve	look at the dress
4	visual internal constructed	Vic	create a mental image of the dress worn by the person
5	kinesthetic internal	Ki	get an internal feeling from looking at it
6	auditory internal dialog	Aid	ask oneself 'Do I like that impression?'
7	auditory external	Ae	reply

Logically, these or similar steps must take place somewhere in consciousness in order to cognitively make sense of the question and answer it. A sequence of this kind is known in NLP as a strategy - in this case, a functional outline of the strategy used by the mind in answering that question. In a similar way, the process leading to a panic attack of the form "I see the clock, ask myself where the kids are, imagine everything that could be happening and feel scared" might be notated as having a subjective structure: V^e → A^id → V^ic → Kⁱ, signifying that an external sight leads to internal dialog (a question), followed by internal and constructed images, leading to a feeling.

It's worth noting that usually, some of these steps (often the most important ones) occur extremely fast, and out of conscious awareness. For example, few people would ordinarily be aware that between question and even considering an answer, there must be steps in which the mind interprets and contextualizes the question itself, and steps which explore various possible strategies to be used to obtain an answer and select one to be followed. The mental occurrence of these steps is often identified by deduction following skilled observation, or by careful inquiry, although their presence is usually self-apparent to the person concerned once noticed.

Keep it Hypnotic

Dave