Calibration and Eye Accessing Cues

Calibration Neurotoy

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This program tunes your calibration skills. When you click Show, Guru will access several rep systems. Track his eyes, and make mental note of the strategy.

Click Answer to test yourself, Next to see a new strategy, and Again to see the strategy again. Click the picture to change the face.

What is calibration?

Physiology and State

Ever watch someone daydream? It's hard to miss. Most of the time, they're staring off into space - probably at the ceiling. What about someone who feels overwhelmed by their emotions? Have you ever noticed how people who feel bad tend to look down at their feet?

Our physiology - the way we move and hold our bodies - the way we think and feel. Just as important, our mental state impacts our physiology.

This mind-body link is a fundamental part of NLP. Right now, we'll focus on the way people tend to show their thinking strategies by moving their eyes, and how we can use this to power up our communication.

Rep Systems

We have five senses, and we can talk. That's how we come to know the world. In NLP, we call these channels rep systems - short for representation, and we tend to break them down like this:

name	symbol	use
Visual Constructed	Vc	Used to create visual images.
Visual Remembered	Vr	Used to access visual memories.
Auditory Constructed	Ac	Used to imagine new sounds.
Auditory Remembered	Ar	Used to access memories of sound.
Auditory Internal Dialogue	Aid	Used to generate language, or "That little voice in your head." Sometimes called Auditory Digital (Ad).
Kinesthetic	K	Used to access feelings. This is actually a collection of rep systems and senses, including emotions, sensations of temperature, motion, pressure, pain and pleasure, body awareness, and gravity.
Olfactory	O	Used to access the sense of smell.
Gustatory	G	Used to access the sense of taste.

Here's the fun part. People tend to move their eyes in specific directions when they access each rep system. In NLP, we call these movements eye accessing cues.

Most right-handed people move their eyes in the directions shown in these diagrams - up for visual, level for auditory, down for language and feelings, to their right for constructed data, and to their left for remembered. Some left-handed people's accessing cues are mirrored from left to right, and some people may have completely different layouts altogether.

By matching the words a person uses to their eye movements, you can figure out which cues correspond to which rep systems. Once you know that, you can tell exactly what patterns the person uses to think.

As you pay more attention to signals other people send out, you'll become more aware of how much their nonverbal communication reflects their models of the world. Matching a person's external behavior to their internal workings is called calibration.

The easiest way to start is to get another person, and ask them some questions that presuppose that they think in certain ways. For example, to see what a person looks like when she's thinking in pictures, ask her a question that requires her to make a mental image. Here are some example questions for each rep system:

Use specific questions. If you asked "what does your favorite food taste like?" rather than "what does chocolate taste like?" Then the person has to sort through all the foods they like to find out which is their favorite. They might make pictures of the food, or remember making comments about a great meal before they ever get around to thinking about how it tastes. The taste of chocolate, on the other hand, asks for exactly what you need.

With practice, you can learn to consciously embed sensory-specific language into your normal conversations. Not only will this make whatever you're saying more involving, it will give you the chance to covertly gather information about your audience.

Two cautions: first, sometimes people are unaware of how they store information. For example, I've known people who totally ignore their visual images. They say their car is red. If you ask how they know, they say they tell themselves. But their eyes suggest they make an image and then talk about it. Why argue? Just pay attention, trust your senses, and make use of what they tell you.

Second, if a person looks up, all it means is that they looked up. This eye accessing stuff can be useful sometimes. It's not the law.

Finally, as you train your senses, you can get more specific. What does this person's eyes (and face and body) do when they think about love? About money? About you? Where in the space around them do they make these images? Pay attention, and people put their entire world up for show.

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