by Robert DILTS

I am deeply grateful to John Grinder for taking the time to write such a rich and thoughtful review of my interview (see http://www.strategies-icmc.com). I very much appreciate John’s desire for congruence and his integrity with respect to what he defines and understands as NLP.

I share with him a desire for consistency and clarity regarding the intellectual history of NLP. This is one of the reasons that Judith DeLozier and I took four years in writing the 1600 page Encyclopedia of Systemic NLP. John makes a number of criticisms in his review. Some are issues related to facts and some are more related to his view and interpretation of NLP (which as a co-founder of the field is clearly quite significant). An important issue John brings up relates to the discovery of the NLP eye movement patterns. Of course, John is absolutely correct in his concern with the statement quoted in the interview that I had “discovered the eye movement technique.” As the primary author of NLP Volume I and in my nearly 20 other books on NLP, or in the hundreds of seminars I have conducted around the world, I have never made the claim to be the discover of the NLP eye movement patterns and was surprised to hear that I was quoted as saying this in the interview. I checked with the interviewer and confirmed that my actual statement from the English recording was, “I was actually very much involved in the practical development of all the strategies work ... I would say also I helped discover the things with eye movements. I was less interested in the therapy techniques. I was interested in some of the more fundamental principles of NLP ...” When doing the translation of the interview, the word “helped” was left out. Both the interviewer and I apologize for any confusion created by this unfortunate omission, which has since been corrected. To clarify my comment, I do feel that I was very involved in the original research and observations surrounding John and Richard’s discovery of the eye movements patterns. I remember the excitement of making, noting and reporting many observations of eye movements (and may have been the first person to actually write them down on paper). However, John and Richard were certainly the source of the studies and observations we made.

I have a very clear memory of a key moment in early 1976, for instance. I was in John’s Syntax 100 class. We had been discussing the generative power of language. John gave us the assignment to notice something that we had not paid much attention to before, give it a name and notice how our experience of it changed. After class I was talking with John to get a little clarification about the kinds of things he meant. At a certain moment, he said, “What about that? Your eyes just moved to the side.”

As soon as I became aware of the movement, I remember being cognizant that I had “gone inside” and had been thinking about something that was just below my conscious awareness. I gave this phenomenon the name of something like “unconscious cuing.” From that moment it was as if scales fell from my eyes and I suddenly became aware of all the things people did unconsciously to cue themselves: blinking their eyes, touching their faces, looking to different locations, making little gestures, noises and facial expressions, etc. John seemed pleased with these observations and gave me more specific assignments with respect to observing various cues, including eye movements. I vividly remember sitting with Judith DeLozier during one of Bandler and Grinder’s weekly evening group meetings and looking into each others eyes as we asked each other questions and noticing the spontaneous movements in different directions. My early work with eye movements culminated with a research study at the Langley Porter Institute in San Francisco in 1977 correlating EEG recordings of brain waves with eye movements and representational systems. This study was written up in (1983) and also appears in the Roots of NLPEncyclopedia of Systemic NLP (2000).

In addition to the background John provides in his review, Judith DeLozier and I point out in the Encyclopedia of Systemic NLP that the notion that eye movements might be related to internal representations was first suggested by American psychologist William James in his book Principles of Psychology (1890, pp. 193-195). Observing that some forms of micromovement always accompany thought, James wrote:

I cannot think in visual terms, or example, without feeling a fluctuating play of pressures, convergences, divergences, and accommodations in my eyeballs . . . When I try to remember or reflect, the movements in question . . . feel like a sort of withdrawal from the outer world. As far as I can detect, these feelings are due to an actual rolling outwards and upwards of the eyeballs.

It is also the case that there was a surge of interest in the meaning of eye movements in the early 1970s when psychologists such as Kinsbourne (1972), Kocel et al (1972) and Galin & Ornstein (1974), began to equate lateral eye movements to processes related to the different hemispheres of the brain. They observed that right-handed people tended to shift their heads and eyes to the right during “left hemisphere” (logical and verbally oriented) tasks, and to move their heads and eyes to the left during “right hemisphere” (artistic and spatially oriented) tasks. That is, people tended to look in the opposite direction of the part of the brain they were using to complete a cognitive task. We were all very aware of this research.

It was the brilliance of John Grinder along with that of Richard Bandler, however, that was responsible for the initial coding of the visual, auditory and kinesthetic accessing cues along the up, lateral and downward axis of eye movement. With regard to the other comments John has made in the interview, these are more “epistemological” conversations than issues of historical accuracy. John and I are currently meeting and discussing a number of these issues. Recently I wrote an introduction to an article by John and Carmen Bostic St. Clair on the topic of modelling in NLP. I believe that this is a very rich exchange and helps to address a number of the questions John raised in his response to my interview. This interchange is posted on the Internet in English at: http://forum1.nlpwhisperinginthewind.com/ShowMessage.asp?ID=10359
and in French at http://www.strategies-icmc.com.

We are currently planning another discussion clarifying the content model versus process model distinction. We will be publishing the results of this discussion in another on-line exchange in the coming months.

Once again, I am very grateful to John for his comments on my interview and his commitment to promoting the integrity of NLP.

Robert DILTS
Santa Cruz, California
January, 2006