Introduction
Being one of the "tiddlers" (I'm referring to the criticism, not to the author) there isn't really enough material to make both a short and a long version of this criticism from Professor Michael Corballis. So we'll stick with just "the short version".
This consists of two quotes from a single chapter in a book on so-called Mind Myths, edited by Professor Sergio Della Sala, whose own views on "NLP" appear in another of these sub FAQs.
*** The Short Version ***
Critic(s):
(at the time of publication)
Professor Michael Corballis: Director of the Research Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Critical Material:
Two fragments of Chapter 2, Are we in our right minds? (1999). In Mind Myths: Exploring Popular Assumptions about the Mind and Brain. Pages 29 and 41
Nature of criticism:
Corballis offers two criticisms:
Neuro-Linguistic Programming supports the supposededly complementary functions of the two halves of the brain, and
The name "Neurolinguistic [sic] Programming" is a fake title, designed to give the appearance of scientific respectability.
Original/derivative:
The first criticism might be original - which only means I don't recall seeing it anywhere else.
The second criticism was expressed in almost exactly the same terms by a Dutch Professor, Willem Levelt, Director of the Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguïstiek in Nijmegen, Holland. Levelt's comment first appeared in a Dutch media magazine Intermediair, in 1995, and in the skeptics' magazine Skepter the following year.
Since Corballis provides no references in this endnote we have no way of knowing whether or not he had ever encountered Levelt's allegation.
Flaw(s):
On the first point Corballis was quoting from a 20 year old book and apparently assumes that nothing has changed since then.
On the second point he had, just like Dr Willem Levelt, (a) mistaken the significance of the term "Neuro-Linguistic", and (b) consequently based his comment on the process referred to in the FoNLP as "mind reading".
Discussion
In his contribution to Sergio Della Sala's book Mind Myths (Wiley, 1999) - the chapter entitled Are We in Our Right Minds? - Professor Corballis wrote:
Programmes like Superlearning and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (Bandler and Grinder, 1979), which pay extensive homage to the supposedly complementary functions of the two sides of the brain, continue to draw fee-paying converts and are big business worldwide."
(Mind Myths, 1999. page 29. Italics as in the original)
What the Professor either forgot to tell us, or simply ignored, was that:
- On the previous page (page 28), Corballis had quoted from an article in the Harvard Business Review by the well-known Professor Harold Mintzberg called Planning on the left side and managing oh the right [of the brain]. The article was published in 1976, approximately two years before the seminar led by Bandler and Grinder, which was the basis for the 1979 book. Does Corballis have one set of criteria for academics and another for non-academics?
- Again on the previous page (page 28) Corballis mentioned that in his book "The Dragons of Eden [1977] Carl Sagan, the noted cosmologist and popularizer of science, had portrayed the right hemisphere as the creative but paranoid instigator of scientific ideas, often seeing patterns and conspiracies where they do not exist" and that "the role of the rational left hemisphere is to submit these ideas to critical scrutiny". Was Sagan also wrong? If so, why didn't Corballis call him to account?
- Roger Sperry, who was at the forefront of the "split brain" research, received a Nobel Prize for his work in 1981.
The two halves of the human brain are connected by the corpus callosum, a huge bundle of something like 200,000,000 (two hundred million) axons (the nerve fibres that ransmit signals from one neuron to another). Studies by Sperry and by Michael Gazzaniga showed that in humans, if the corpus callosun was completely severed (a last resort treatement for severe epilepsy) then the patient might start to act as if they had two separate and opposing brains and would do things like try to remove a piece of clothing with one hand whilst trying to pull it back on with the other. It seems hard to account for the continued existence of this physical feature if it isn't indeed a means of allowing the two halves of the brain to communicate and co-operate rather than working in isolation or even opposition, even if neuroscientists have yet to discover exactly what is going on
In short, at the time when Bandler and Grinder were laying down the material that appeared in the book Frogs into Princes (1978/1979), they had excellent reasons for supposing that the complementarity of the two sides of the brain was a viable concept.
It should be noticed, moreover, that Corballis was writing some twenty years after Frogs into Princes was first published, yet he offers no evidence whatever that this is still a major feature of the FoNLP (to the best of my knowledge, it isn't).
Indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking that the inclusion of such a brief reference to Neuro-Linguistic Programming (notice the hyphen in this first mention of the name) in this chapter was nothing more than an excuse for the little rant in Note 1 at the end of the chapter:
1. This is a thoroughly fake title, designed to give the impression of scientific respectability. Neurolinguistic [sic] Programming has little to do with neurology, linguistics, or even a respectable discipline called neurolinguistics.
(Mind Myths, page 41)
This is, to say the least, an unfortunate faux pas, which merely serves to demonstrate the lack of accurate informate which lies behind these comments.
Starting from the beginning:
- The "neuro" in "neuro-linguistic programming" simply refers to the idea that all behaviour stems from the procedures by which the brain processes input received via the five senses. It has been suggested that in this case it would have been more appropriate to have called it "cognitive-linguistic programming". But there is a very specific reason why the term "neuro-linguistic" was chosen, which we will come to in a moment.
- Saving the best for last I want to jump ahead to the suggestion that Neuro-Linguistic Programming "has little to do with neurology [or] lingustics", which in practice doesn't seem to make much sense at all.
-
(a) IF it is the brain which accepts, processes and responds to information received from the five senses/representational systems, and the prefix neuro refers to neurons and the nervous system, and the brain is part of the central nervous system, then how could Neuro-Linguistic Programming not be an appropriate label?
(b) John Grinder, one of the co-creators of Neuro-Linguistic Programming was an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz when he, Bandler and another student, named Frank Pucelik, began to work on what became the FoNLP. He had also co-authored, with Suzette Elgin , a college-level textbook on Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar: A Guide to Transformational Grammar: History, Theory, Practice in 1973.
(c) The FoNLP is first and foremost about communication skills (see a definition on the impartial (in this context) website of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine
"A set of models of how communication impacts and is impacted by subjective experience. Techniques are generated from these models by sequencing of various aspects of the models in order to change someone's internal representations. Neurolinguistic programming is concerned with the patterns or programming created by the interactions among the brain, language, and the body, that produce both effective and ineffective behavior."
Not surprisingly, then, many of the NLP-related techniques are based on a study of how successful people use various language patterns in their interactions with other people.
(d) Under the circumstances it seems a little odd, to say the least, to suggest that Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the related techniques have "little to do with ... linguistics".
- And last, but certainly not least, notice that although Neuro-Linguistic Programming (with hyphen) is spelt correctly in the body of the article, here it suddenly loses the hyphen. Of course that may be no more than a "typo", but in this context it does help to make it look like the name is just "neurolinguistics" with "programming" tacked on at the end. Except that that would be an entirely self-defeating argument. Because:
- The name neuro-linguistic programming was selected by Richard Bandler in the 1970s (earliest known published use is in the references section of the book Changing with Families (Bandler, Grinder and Satir, 1976)
- The name neurolinguistics (no hyphen) is believed to have been coined by Harry Whitaker, who founded the Journal of Neurolinguistics in 1985, nine years after the probable first use by Richard Bandler.
How, then, could Bandler and Grinder hi-jack a name that wouldn't appear until the next decade?
Dafter still, if Corballis' accusation ('mind reading') were accurate then logically it would be Harry Whitiker who was trying to establish credibility by hi-jacking neurolinguistic from Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
I don't think so!
- In practise the term neuro-linguistic, as used in the name Neuro-Linguistic Programming, was actually coined by Alfred Korzybski, creator of General Semantics - one of the resources accessed by Bandler and Grinder when NLP and the FoNLP were in development (Bandler & Grinder, 1975. p. ). And Korzybski did that at least as far back as 1936, thus: Korzybski, A., Neuro-Semantics and Neuro-Linguistic Mechanisms Extensionalization [sic]. General Semantics as a Natural Experimental Science. In the American Journal of Psychiatry, No. XCIII, July 1936. Pages 29-38.
That's only months away from half a century earlier than Harry Whitiker is said to have coined the term "neuriolinguistics".
Such, then, are the fantasies conceived by academics when they don't do their research.
Despite having received a number of prestigious awards for his work as a psychologist, Corballis seems to have become as careless and confused as many of his academic peers when it comes to NLP and the FoNLP (field of NLP).
*** End of Short Version ***
References
Bandler, R., & Grinder, J. (1978/1979). Frogs into Princes. Moab, UT: Real People Press.
Corballis, M. (1999). Are We in Our Right Minds?, in Mind Myths: Exploring Popular Assumptions about the Mind and Brain, Sergio Della Sala (ed). John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK
Korzybski, A., Neuro-Semantics and Neuro-Linguistic Mechanisms Extensionalization [sic]. General Semantics as a Natural Experimental Science. In the American Journal of Psychiatry, No. XCIII, July 1936. Pages 29-38.
Andy Bradbury can be contacted at: bradburyac@hotmail.com