Anchoring is not NLP, huh? Wow, it’s kinda weird that it’s about the first thing taught to NLP students.

The simple FACT is, Derren Brown does use NLP (in particular anchoring, submodalities and language patterns) and it’s obvious to anybody that has more than a cursory knowledge of the topic.

Magicians and mentalists do their very best to separate mechanism from effect. They do it by distraction. That often involves placing a fake intervention in the way to distract from the real mechanism (often a simple trick).

Derren Brown fakes psychic ability to distract from the real mechanism in mentalism. He fakes voodoo to distract from the real mechanism in hypnotic acts. He fakes NLP in order to distract people in the same way.

In his books he has stated his total disdain for NLP. He has done the same with photoreading, . Yet he fakes those things to draw attention away from the relatively simple tricks he is using. He might use simple hypnosis techniques such as anchoring, but those are not NLP.

I know one thing its proof of and that’s how blinkered and ignorant some people can be if what they see doesn’t fit their map of the world.”

-No, hundreds of thousands of satisfied clients isn’t proof, of anything except their satisfaction. The elephants in the room here are things like the placebo effect, and confirmation bias. In all situations that are difficult to measure it is well established that we feel what we want to feel and see what we want to see. ANY ‘ritual intervention’ will produce a significant number of subjects who report improvement, and a significant number of practitioners who will claim to see improvement.

Until that fact is accepted, scientific understanding cannot begin. Scientific knowledge is not a ‘different’ kind of knowledge, it is simply knowledge honestly won through rigorous disciplines of investigation that aim to eliminate things like placebo and confirmation bias.

The accusation of blinkered ignorance is very bouncy -careful how you throw it :-)

Andrew

I did get another long comment from David that was pretty much the same as the others and once again linking to the same blog post to back up his nonsense.

I simply see no value in publishing it especially as he talks about NLP being used to ‘scam people out of their much needed money’ That is beyond the pale because nobody moves into this industry to get rich unless they are very stupid.

Did you read the post he kept linking too?

It was bizarre. I considered breaking it down and demonstrating all the areas is was wrong, but realized it may take me 2 or 3 hours. That was time I didn’t want to spend on trying to convince one person who would remain unconvinced no matter what I said.

According to David hundreds of thousands of satisfied clients isn’t proof. That is and of itself sums up what is wrong with great swathes of academia, the belief that if you can’t measure it it doesn’t exist.

I know one thing its proof of and that’s how blinkered and ignorant some people can be if what they see doesn’t fit their map of the world.

BTW, one final thing. I’ve always thought eye accessing cues were hit and miss. They need a baseline forming and are less than 100% reliable even then. It’s a shame so many people jump on that one thing as proof that NLP is a scam.

Anchoring and Swish Patterns are grounded in Pavlovian conditioning and Behaviourism.

I think Tim is right, this isn’t really a rational debate, when a person arguing against NLP is not arguing logically but rather re-iterrating subjective opinions. To say that NLP is pseudoscience as a whole would be an expression of dire ignorance. Psychological models generally tend to build on previous research, so I doubt every single theory in NLP is pseudoscience, since, it is, actually, based on previous Psychology research (Pavlov, Erickson, Perls).

Not to mention that there are Government accredited tertiary programs being run here titled “NLP diploma”. I didn’t know Government departments funded Graduate programs that actually aren’t training programs at all, but rather pseudoscience and scams.

I think these debates will go on forever, the only simple conclusion that one can reasonably make is as Tim mentioned earlier:
“There is no ONE thing called NLP! It is made up of dozens of component parts.”

It’s amusing you keep referring back to the same website, a website itself that has zero credibility with inaccurate, poorly researched and dishonest posts like the one that you seem so infatuated by.

Whatever. You have your opinion, I have mine and I see no value in continuing this in the comments, so I’m done.

The option to post is still there is you really think you know what you’re talking about and are prepared to open the debate up to a wider audience. Otherwise, let’s just let it go.

Neurolinguistic programing is full of wild claims. Grinder alluded to Chomskys ideas of deep and surface structure in the 70s. Chomsky had already ditched that theory in the 60s. Why? Because there it failed scientific testing.

Contrast Chomsky and Grinder. Grinder is still referring to debunked freudian notions of the subconscious (from subliminal learning to native american shamanism).

Tim, your argument can be equally applied to support scientology. Dianetics involves many techniques. Voodoo involves a degree of goal setting. It is all just pseudoscience though.

There are characteristics that are core to neurolinguistic programing. These are defining features that make it recognizable. For example, the eye accessing diagrams in the books. Its pseudoscience. Neurolinguistic programing is a phantom in iteslf:

(create a phantom)
http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/pratkanis.htm

Neurolinguistic programing proponents push other such phantoms, such as the use of subconscious learning. Research shows such learning it puny compared to conscious assimilation. Yet people buy into the con, just like they buy into scientology.

Sorry, but your neurolinguistic programing is as pseudoscientific as it sounds.

http://knol.google.com/k/neurolinguistic-programming#Pseudoscience

The mythologies and pseudoscientific bunkum in neurolinguistic programing will always pollute any minority of sensible method taught there. If you want to make neurolinguistic programing useful, then treat it honestly: as the best example of pseudoscience today.

Life coaching is a lot simpler if you don’t teach your clients how to embarrass themselves using new age pseudoscience. The alternative is a lot easier and more productive.

Incredible claims require incredible evidence. Neurolinguistic programming has failed. The evidence points to its classification as a discredited new age pseudoscience. Look at the adverts and new age nonsense that NLPers are selling. It is getting more pseudoscientific as the years go by. NLP is becoming more useful as an example of pseudoscientific babble to avoid.