Richard Bandler and John Grindler, the founders of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), began their work in the 1970s at the University of California. Bandler was a mathematician and Grindler was a linguist, both were interested in the study of psychotherapy.
As they studied successful therapists, they began to discover that people have three basic methods of perceiving the world around them:
- Visually
- Auditory
- Kinesthetically
Some people are very good at seeing the world around them - these people use a visual representation system, if you understand by hearing things, then you're auditory and if you are more inclined to feel things, you're kinesthetic. It must be stressed that you use all these different methods of perception, but there will be one that you favour more than another.
Humans experience themselves and the world through their five senses - seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting. These are the sensory systems that people use to make sense of the world around them.
We all encode, store, organise and attach meaning to everything we experience through these senses or sensory modalities. These are refrerred to in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) as representational systems.
Our map of the world is our internal perception of what the world is like, it is our personal "thumb print" of the world as we see, hear, feel, smell and taste it. Not one person's map of reality is the same, we all experience external reality in our own personal way. So, in other words, “The Map is not the Territory”.
There are smaller, units of reference to each Representational System, which we in turn represent, code and then file at the submodality level. We are bombarded by millions of sensory pieces of information every second and this sensory input is filtered in various ways by our central nervous system, therefore limiting the amount of information that we are consciously aware of at any given time.
As I've mentioned previously, we are very good at deleting, distorting and generalising and without these neurological filters we would be completely overwhelmed by the constant deluge of information we come into contact with every second, of every day.
One of the wonderful ways we process information is internally by one, or any combination of the five senses. By watching someone's eyes, we can get visual clues as to where the person stores their information and how they will later act on it.
This is what Bandler and Grindler, the co-creators of NLP, called eye accessing clues. Having closely observed people's eye movements, they concluded that you could understand a person's processing of information purely by watching the direction they moved their eyes.
If you're looking at someone and they move their eyes upwards and to their right (your left), then they are visually constructing information. This means they are seeing images of things never seen before or trying to imagine what something will look like, for example, a question such as “What will you be doing in five years time?”.
If they move their eyes upwards and to their left (your right), it means that they are visually remembering images from the past, for example, if you asked them the colour of their front door.
Sometimes visuals will gaze in an unfocussed way (a bit like day dreaming) a they let their imagination paint pictures with words. This is their way of synthesizing thoughts, coverting words into images.
When a person thinks in an auditory mode, they move their eyes in a different direction to those who are thinking visually. Instead of looking up, they look to the sides and down to their left (your right).
A person thinking in an auditory mode will move their eyes to the side and right when they are constructing auditory information. Hearing sounds not heard before, with questions such as: “What would a dog sound like if he was barking?”.
If they move their eyes to their left (your right), they will be hearing sounds that they've heard before. A question such as: “What did he just say?” would prompt this type of eye movement.
If you were talking to yourself, for example the question: “Recite your favourite poem, or the words of your favourite song,” you would move your eyes down and to the left (your right).
Have you heard of the saying: “He was downright mean”? This is probably because the person was looking down and to the right and experiencing a powerful emotion.
Kinesthetic eye movement is all about feelings, emotions, sensations and tactile experience. When you are in this mode of processing information your eyes take you down "into yourself" - your feelings.
Moving your eyes down and to the right is a powerful indicator that the person is processing kinesthetically. A question such as, “How do you feel about that?” will envoke this eye movement.
