Infoflow

HTB Lab Notes and Vital Stats

Hello again, everyone. :) Welcome back. This issue has been brewing in the back of my mind for quite some time, and I think it's finally time to pour it out, pass it around, and see how we might all enjoy ourselves for the next hundred and something lines.

You see, I'm a teacher by nature (and occasionally by profession). I'm also a fanatic learner. I love the fun of diving into a pool of knowledge, and splashing others on the shore, just to watch them jump. I've begun to wonder how much of that playfulness has actually seeped its way into HTB (and in fact, into other contexts of my life). I realized that it's not enough to change my writing style or my philosophies. I'd like to actually devote an issue to talking about playfulness and the flow of knowledge. Consider it a squirt gun aimed at an unsuspecting friend. :)

Besides ideas loosly designed to help manifest people's buddha natures, one of the main quests of this column is a model for writing a good column. I mean, how does a writer build an audience? What styles of writing, what ideas, etc. work best memetically, meaning, what makes people want to get their friends to read something? That's something I'm interested in. It's something I'm learning, and in the spirit of the internet, it's something I've decided to share. Thus, from now on, I will be including HTB's vital statistics:

Subscriber Count: 80

Granted, that's only one statistic, and it doesn't take into account all the people who read HTB on the newsgroups or on the web, but perhaps it's a useful gauge of an overall trend. In any case, memetics fans might find it interesting.

Anyway... <squirt!>

Fusion

Of all the ideas I've encountered in books and in discussions about the mind, one of the oddest is called Trancendental Meditation. Oh, I understand the concept well enough. You chunk your thought processes down to a singe word, or mantra, and repeat it over and over. You become very focused, and as you send your neurons the same signal over and over again, they simply accept it, and your awareness of the mantra sinks below consciousness. You're totally blank. When you finally notice the world again, even the most banal surroundings seem bright and new. You feel relaxed and refreshed. I understand that.

What I don't understand is why so few people grok the inverse. There is another way to step out of our normal consciousness, and it can produce positive life- and world-changing results. I call this process fusion.

Where TM creates a state of oneness by our letting go of all conscious thoughts, fusion connects each and every thought like tinkertoys until new thoughts cannot help but get pulled in.

Many people have described this state, and almost everyone has experienced it. It is one of the most powerful learning states I can imagine, and leads directly to flashes of what can only be called enlightenment.

Enlightenment is not reserved for hermit gurus on remote mountaintops. It is a process we all go through as we acquire new learnings. Enlightenment literally means to bring light to something, and that light is knowledge. Look at the expressions we use: "It dawned on me." "A lightbulb went off in my head." "It came to me in a flash." All submodalities aside, and before you go and make all your ideas big and bright and connected to one another, let's take a look at how to get there, and how to bring a friend.

States

I used to have a major discrepancy between the way I acted in person and the way I acted while talking on the phone. In person, I was shy and reserved, while on the phone I talked so much more. I used to have a good friend who I hardly ever saw, but we talked all the time on the phone, and the quality of those conversations were much higher than that of the conversations I had in person with my other friends. When I first began talking to Lori, she was in Atlanta and I lived in Dallas, and we wound up building our relationship through long, far-ranging conversations on the phone. When I moved up to Atlanta to be with her and to study NLP, I somehow found myself losing touch with that aspect of my personality.

One day while were at home, Lori asked me to call her from my phone line in my room, and we started talking, and playing around. At one point in the conversation, she walked into my room carrying her phone. I stood there, looking at her, still talking into the phone, and I realized that it had been a long time since we'd had a face to face conversation that was this good. All of my experience in one state (talking on the phone) suddenly leapt into another (talking face to face).

In NLP terms, I had one state anchored to talking on the phone, and one state anchored to talking face to face. When Lori walked in, the anchors collapsed.

Thinking and learning are all about states. Remember that in NLP, a state is defined as the sum of a person's physiology (posture, breathing, etc) and her focus (real or imagined sights, sounds, and feelings in the person's awareness). There are certain states, or sequences of states, that work well for anything humans are capable of duing, whether it's riding a bicycle, solving an equation, or carrying on a conversation. There are other states that don't. (For example, the state many great mathematicians or programmers go into when they are working on an idea is not a very useful state to use when they're talking to someone they love - in that work state, the loved one might get totally ignored!)

Whenever I've worked with a student, whether I was teaching a kid to read better, or explaining an idea to a friend of mine, I take the time to notice what states they had been using to think about the subject. That is, how had they aligned the pictures and sounds in their mind, and how did those pictures and sounds correlate with the data they were getting from the outside world. And how were they using their feelings, their body, etc? All of this is simply a matter of paying attention to the person when they talk about the subject (calibration), and filling in the pieces with a few well-paced questions.

From there, it's just a matter of building a better state, or sequence of states for them to use, anchoring it, and collapsing it with where they had been, so that the student can easily access the new understanding.

Probably the most famous example of this is the simple spelling strategy (which, I like to point out, also works great for phone numbers). Good spellers have a two part strategy - first, they make a picture of a word, and then they get a feeling about whether or not it's spelled right. The process can be taught in a few minutes.

Now, that one's easy. It's sort of the "Hello, world" of neurolinguistic programming. Other applications, while made up of similarly simple steps and states, allow us to do all the amazing things people do, and to cook up new things to do when we're ready for a change. It happens all the time because our brains our self- programming, but we can consciously take control of this process, and that's where the fun sets in.

Perl

This weekend, I finally bought the camel book. It's actual title is Programming Perl by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Randal L. Schwartz. People call it the camel book, because there's an engraving of a camel on the front (there's a llama book for beginners).

The attitude behind Perl is a lot like the attitude behind NLP. Larry Wall (who also invented the Perl language) apparently has quite an interest in linguistics, and Perl is designed to act much like a natural language like English. That is, the syntax is similar, but also, you don't have to know the whole language to use it. You can write programs in perl "baby-talk" and still get your point across to the machine. This ties in with one of the fundamental ideas in perl: there's more than one way to do it. What really fascinated me about the camel book was a reference to Wall's three great virtues of programming: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Laziness actually leads a good programmer to work efficiently and plan ahead. That is, they make sure that they check their work and document their code, and keep their programs useful. All of this saves them lots of energy in the future. Impatience is anger aimed at lazy computers. It leads programmers to create programs that that can anticipate the user's need in the future, to create and reuse software tools. Finally, hubris, or excessive pride, leads great programmers to write programs that impress others. It keeps quality up.

These are the virtues of a great programmer, whether you are programming a machine, or a human brain. Since NLP is teaching done right, the virtues apply to teaching. Lazy NLP'ers will save energy by callibrating their client's responses to stay on task. They'll future pace and take care of ecology and they'll aim for generative change. All of these things make their lifes easier, whether the context is therapy, teaching, or even sales.

Impatient NLP'ers will apply every pattern, every learning, so that each experienc builds their skills up. They'll quickly help their clients connect with their internal resources so that they can begin to create their own changes, and even quicker.

Finally, hubris definitely drives the great NLP'ers and teachers I have known. They create for themselves a powerful, larger than life state so that clients respect them enough to listen and to act on their teachings. The great teachers set the highest standards for their students, and do everything in their power to help their students reach them. That is how they earn the title "great".

Infoflow

I have another book, which is about electronics. It tells me how I can create a battery with a lemon and two metal rods. In fact, there are several experiments that show how electricity can be manipulated or generated with only a few common materials. The book is actually aimed at adolescents, and it goes on to explain all sorts of concepts needed to build electronic circuits. A teenager with very little mathematical skill can now put together complicated circuits. Yet a hundred and something years ago, the brightest minds in the country were working like crazy just to generate and harness electricity.

How can something that seems so simple now have been so hard back then? Didn't they have lemons?

The answer is simply that we know more. People in the past created ideas and discovered new things about the world, and that knowledge builds. Through hundreds and thousands of individual people's effort, the human race as a whole is getting smarter and smarter and smarter. The culture, the worldmind if you will, learns. Further, it learns by the exact same process we do: by fusing ideas together.

For example, take the idea of memetics. Richard Dawkins, a biologist, created the word "meme" when he took what he knew about genetics and applied it to ideas. From a programming perspective, he reused some mental code for one project that he had already used for another. Laziness and Impatience!

A meme, in memetics compares to a gene in genetics. Thus, a meme is a small idea that binds together to create other ideas. (It also tries to replicate itself). So from a memetic perspective, when Dawkins created memetics, some memes from the world of genetics used his brain to replicate themselves into the world of ideas! Two ideas met, a new idea was born, and that idea spread into an entire new field.

Einstein came along after electricity was discovered. He took the ideas of Field Theory, which models the electromagnetic force, and used them as a tool to explore his daydreams about the nature of light. His equations allow us to understand exactly how radio and electronics actually work.

So if ideas combine to create new ideas, how can we combine all of these ideas into a model for effective teaching?

The Connection Machine

Brains work on their own. Sometimes, they act like a computer, doing the same thing over and over without noticing. A good programmer can change the code, press some buttons, and suddenly that brain starts acting like a brain again - learning, communicating, having fun.

I've become a fan of big chunk learning. That means that when I teach (either myself or someone else), I like to go for the big picture first. What are good ways to think about a subject, even before I know anything about it? How is it like other things I already understand? I build a foundation.

Now, how is this foundation different from what I'm trying to learn? What more do I need to know to be able to do what it is I want to do? Let's take perl, for example. I wanted to refine a program I had already written. The program takes a bunch of text files with HTML codes in them (in this case the raw text files for Hacking the Buddha) and formats them to look like an HTML template. This means that many similar-looking web pages can be changed instantly by updating one template and running the program.

In this case, I knew in my mind step by step what the computer would have to do. I had already taught myself a little perl in writing the original code, but this version was a lot more advanced, and I simply didn't know the words that would tell perl what to do. I didn't have to read an entire book to write my program. I didn't have to master the language. I simply found what worked, and looked up anything that didn't. Laziness and impatience again, yet it allowed me to create a very useful tool in a short amount of time!

By creating a vague model of where you want to lead someone, and comparing it with where they are, you not only save yourself so much time, but you can keep a student interested.

If there's a state A and a state B, the shortest distance between them is a logical progression of states, where each is a little more like B and a little less like A. (Think of it as a line in multidimensional hilbert space, where each dimension is a variable that contributes to a state. Don't worry if you don't understand that. Instead, go get a book on linear algebra, try on these ideas about learning, and figure it out for yourself!)

If you want to teach somebody something, lead them through the states.

Conclusion

I'm beginning to understand now why Carmine, the NLP trainer I've studied under, rarely spells things out step by step. It goes in one ear and out the other. But by telling stories and eliciting certain states, teachers convery their messages so much better. Sometimes they don't even know they're doing it.

I admit it, I'm learning what I'm teaching here, and I'm using what I'm learning in order to teach it. All I can say is that it feels better this way. The ideas seem so much more alive. Everything does connect to everything else, and the world does look bright and new.

Think about that. Peace.