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Product reviews for The User's Manual for the Brain Volume II
Paul Jones, Hypnotherapist, LCCH Book Reviewer
Having a background in psychology and (more importantly here) philosophy, I liked this book yet I suspect the masses will find it a little arid.
Whilst volume 1 (I would say a prerequisite read for this book) dealt with the practice of NLP in it's on-the-ground form, volume 2 seeks to deal with the spirit of NLP, leading to “NLP Mastery” (not entirely sure I appreciate the hegemony of this internal nomenclature*). Volume 1 encourages us to ask and answer the “journalists questions'; “what, how, who, when, where”. Volume 2 asks the question the novice and the “NLP Master' will seek quite different answers to; “why?”
Why do some techniques work only some of the time?
Why do some techniques work at all?
Why practice NLP?
In my review of volume 1, I likened the book to the owner's manual for a car, and as any fellow car enthusiast will tell you when it comes to car manuals, there is the owner's (user's) manual then there is the workshop (engineer's / mechanic's) manual. So perhaps volume 2 is the workshop manual, and likewise it also follows that this book will not have the (relatively) popular appeal of the first volume. Much as the home mechanic may take little account of how changes in one system can affect the whole vehicle because it already built, but the engineer / designer must view the vehicle as a whole gestalt, so this book deals with all the NLP systems (models) concurrently.
The concept of “ecology' (opportunity cost / fit) has been something I had been thinking about a lot recently in response to personal change challenges my clients face in my practices.
Sure the “ecology' of a goal is simple practitioner's stuff, but the real ecology of the gestalt, of the real changes made using the techniques and how the techniques interact upon one another, this had got me thinking.
The User's Manual for the Brain Volume 2 was offering some answers, allowing me to delve deeper in my practice, if a particular technique or pattern was not operating as I had hoped, why? And just as importantly, how could I go about improving the dynamic?
One over-arching theme the authors work towards is a “unified theory of NLP', and plentiful use of the concept of “meta'. It was a revelation, to find that the;
1 Meta-States,
2 Meta-Programs,
3 Meta-Model distinctions and the
4 Sub- Modalities (re-designated “meta-modalities' for good reasons you will find out)
- all relate to the same underlying processes.
Redundancy and simplification in the methods, great! Had I not learnt this, I would still have been carrying around, in my head, an unwieldy and disconnected mental model of these different (yet same) facets of the NLP method. Suddenly instead of using rote descriptions and applications of these facets, my mind is developing a compact, flexible, algorithmic perception of this knowledge. When you read the book and the same happens, you'll reap the benefits of the vast applicability of instantly generated techniques.
Another element I enjoyed whilst reading this c.450 page book is that the concept of “meta' is so prominent. During my time studying psychology at university I became very interested in the concepts of paradox, and self reference (reflexivity). Consistent-inconsistency, the rejection of the grand narrative as a grand narrative itself and that sort of thing, all very post modern. Although at this time my interest was purely academic, I always had a niggling feeling that this area of though must have some profound and practical implications ” upon reading this book I found I was right.
Language, meta programmes and meta states create paradox and conflict, not the world at large -in-and-of-it's-self. I knew this yet had not perceived the practical implications before, but in the world there is no paradox, no axiomatic authority, prominence, or hierarchy of levels of meaning. With due respect to the primacy of Bertrand Russel's “sets of categories', Albert Ellis's “compound emotions' and Sartre, but here is a true revelation, an epiphany even, about the position and imposition of meaning in a cold and category-less world.
Wow! People's perceived problems are not absolute or even ones of subjective assessment, but are problems of category and hierarchy alone.
Suddenly sitting before me in my practice were not people with a set problem in and of itself. Instead I found before me people whose arbitrary assignment of pre-eminence of one category (whose delineations are just as arbitrary) over another was operating as a problem within their perceived world. It was as if I was suddenly watching a steam of green numbers cascading downwards against a black background.
Whilst volume 1 (I would say a prerequisite read for this book) dealt with the practice of NLP in it's on-the-ground form, volume 2 seeks to deal with the spirit of NLP, leading to “NLP Mastery” (not entirely sure I appreciate the hegemony of this internal nomenclature*). Volume 1 encourages us to ask and answer the “journalists questions'; “what, how, who, when, where”. Volume 2 asks the question the novice and the “NLP Master' will seek quite different answers to; “why?”
Why do some techniques work only some of the time?
Why do some techniques work at all?
Why practice NLP?
In my review of volume 1, I likened the book to the owner's manual for a car, and as any fellow car enthusiast will tell you when it comes to car manuals, there is the owner's (user's) manual then there is the workshop (engineer's / mechanic's) manual. So perhaps volume 2 is the workshop manual, and likewise it also follows that this book will not have the (relatively) popular appeal of the first volume. Much as the home mechanic may take little account of how changes in one system can affect the whole vehicle because it already built, but the engineer / designer must view the vehicle as a whole gestalt, so this book deals with all the NLP systems (models) concurrently.
The concept of “ecology' (opportunity cost / fit) has been something I had been thinking about a lot recently in response to personal change challenges my clients face in my practices.
Sure the “ecology' of a goal is simple practitioner's stuff, but the real ecology of the gestalt, of the real changes made using the techniques and how the techniques interact upon one another, this had got me thinking.
The User's Manual for the Brain Volume 2 was offering some answers, allowing me to delve deeper in my practice, if a particular technique or pattern was not operating as I had hoped, why? And just as importantly, how could I go about improving the dynamic?
One over-arching theme the authors work towards is a “unified theory of NLP', and plentiful use of the concept of “meta'. It was a revelation, to find that the;
1 Meta-States,
2 Meta-Programs,
3 Meta-Model distinctions and the
4 Sub- Modalities (re-designated “meta-modalities' for good reasons you will find out)
- all relate to the same underlying processes.
Redundancy and simplification in the methods, great! Had I not learnt this, I would still have been carrying around, in my head, an unwieldy and disconnected mental model of these different (yet same) facets of the NLP method. Suddenly instead of using rote descriptions and applications of these facets, my mind is developing a compact, flexible, algorithmic perception of this knowledge. When you read the book and the same happens, you'll reap the benefits of the vast applicability of instantly generated techniques.
Another element I enjoyed whilst reading this c.450 page book is that the concept of “meta' is so prominent. During my time studying psychology at university I became very interested in the concepts of paradox, and self reference (reflexivity). Consistent-inconsistency, the rejection of the grand narrative as a grand narrative itself and that sort of thing, all very post modern. Although at this time my interest was purely academic, I always had a niggling feeling that this area of though must have some profound and practical implications ” upon reading this book I found I was right.
Language, meta programmes and meta states create paradox and conflict, not the world at large -in-and-of-it's-self. I knew this yet had not perceived the practical implications before, but in the world there is no paradox, no axiomatic authority, prominence, or hierarchy of levels of meaning. With due respect to the primacy of Bertrand Russel's “sets of categories', Albert Ellis's “compound emotions' and Sartre, but here is a true revelation, an epiphany even, about the position and imposition of meaning in a cold and category-less world.
Wow! People's perceived problems are not absolute or even ones of subjective assessment, but are problems of category and hierarchy alone.
Suddenly sitting before me in my practice were not people with a set problem in and of itself. Instead I found before me people whose arbitrary assignment of pre-eminence of one category (whose delineations are just as arbitrary) over another was operating as a problem within their perceived world. It was as if I was suddenly watching a steam of green numbers cascading downwards against a black background.
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25/04/2007 01:00
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