This page provides the links to the backnumber issues of the newsletter written in Japanese by Taiten Kitaoka, a Japanese NLP trainer/facilitator. Note: This "provocative" title of the newsletter is meant to suggest that Taiten Kitaoka's NLP work is the first attempt for the integrated NLP in the Japanese market. It is not meant to claim that his NLP work is genuine in a more general sense. ************************************************************************ Issue #5: 2003.11.28. 'This is the Genuine NLP!' ************************************************************************ The author, who has been formally trained by the four most important co-developers of NLP (Grinder, Bandler, Dilts, and DeLozier) will send newsletters containing a variety of information concerning the advanced communication psychology/ pragmatic psychology known as NLP. ************************************************************************ "Methodology for Accelerated Learning a la Kitaoka" Hello everybody! I am Taiten Kitaoka, a Japanese NLP trainer/facilitator. Before going into the topic of the present issue of the newsletter, I would like to mention two things: First of all, I participated in a one day workshop held by Dr John Grinder, one of the two co-founders of NLP, in London around 1995; he made the following statement at the beginning of his workshop (this is not verbatim): "I and Richard Bandler created a totally new system called NLP some 20 years ago, on the basis of our inductive work [NB: meaning that the co-founders of NLP had managed to discover the formulas or behavioural and thinking patterns of a number of great therapists, after studying raw data again and again by repeatedly watching them interact with their clients in recorded videos], and I am quite glad that NLP has already penetrated many social layers, such as education, therapy, business, presentation, sports, arts, law, etc., and will continue to spread deeply and widely into the whole spectrum of society. But, I have been quite disappointed that there have only been applications of NLP since I and Bandler co-founded NLP, and that, unless NLPers do a "quantum leap" of work similar to what we achieved to create NLP, NLP will certainly die out in 20 or 30 years' time." I think that this position of Grinder is similar to that of Leonardo da Vinci, who apparently said "students who cannot go beyond their own masters are 'bad students'." However, it is obvious that this position doesn't mean at all that someone can create his or her own theories or principles based on his or her own partial understanding of NLP, without being able to see the totality of the NLP system. Secondly, I am among the twenty one trainers who have been authorised by Robert Dilts and Judith DeLozier, co-developers of NLP, at the NLP University in Santa Cruz, California, to use the teaching materials of the Practitioner Course of the NLPU. One of the conditions for the use of these materials is that the authorised trainers should use their own original materials for at least half of the Practitioner Course. In this sense, the NLPU seems to have a policy to encourage NLP trainers to organise creatively their training with their own initiatives, instead of just repeating what they have learnt from other senior trainers like parrots. However, the fact remains that to create one's own way of teaching implies that one has already wholly mastered all the basic techniques and models of NLP. Recently, I heard from someone that, among the students of NLP attending at NLP courses, there are those who want to learn only the theories and techniques which are purely classic to NLP. I think that it may be a folly to teach such students only the techniques of some thirty years ago which were devised when NLP was founded, and that to teach them as NLP trainers new creative advanced techniques, after mastering the major classic principles and theories of NLP, doesn't contradict with what such students are really looking for. Presupposing the above background, I now would like to discuss the progressive "method for accelerated learning a la Kitaoka" based on existing NLP techniques. Especially, the way how learning is looked at from the point of view of "Fractals", as a non-NLP model, is unique to mine. The following methodology may not yet be part of the NLP classic tradition, but I hope that it will be incorporated into the NLP system as such in due course. 1. Definition of Learning "Learning" may be defined as the "process of making unconscious and automatic the specific physio-psychological habits that have been established consciously through trial and error". (Note that these habits are equivalent to a process of "TOTE" in NLP terminology.) The beauty of learning is that, once we have learnt something, we don't need to repeat the same trial and error again and again any more, and this aspect of learning is closely related to the metaphor of "Columbus' eggs". In "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", Gregory Bateson discusses different levels of learning, such as "learning to learn (something)", "learning to learn to learn (something)", etc., using the "Theory of Logical Types". Interestingly, it seems that making huge progress in learning (of anything) on a lower (or grosser) level is rather easy - if not very easy - while making infinitesimal progress on a higher (or subtler) level is very difficult; in other words, the same amount of effort and energy which a beginner tennis player may need to achieve impressive progress - say, from 0% to 60% of the learning ratio - seems to be needed for him or her to make very small progress - say, from 99% to 99.9% - later on, when he or she has become a top tennis player. This correlation of learning levels may be explained from the point of view of the extremely interesting modern concept of "Fractals" discussed below. In my own experience, the same NLP techniques have proven to exhibit the effects for accelerated learning both for such a beginner learner and for an advanced learner as above-mentioned. (This will be discussed in detail in the later section on "Fractals".) Incidentally, it was once said that the late Ayrton Senna, one of the very best Formula One drivers, was very great in the sense that, whenever he drove into a corner of a circuit, he was able to fire automatically one of his learnt processes (i.e., programmings) of driving that seemed to be the most suitable for that specific cornering, but that he was still greater in the sense that, whenever he found that the already fired automatic process (i.e., programming) was not working as well as it should for one reason or another, he was able, in the middle of his cornering, to consciously stop that process and immediately switch to another automatic learnt process which was more suitable for that corner. 2. Chunk Up and Chunk Down A Chunk is an important concept of NLP. It is a unit or piece of information that our bio-computer can process as an integral group. It is like a bag, so it can also contain several sub-pieces of information within itself. See the diagram "1. Example of Chunks" on the Web page shown below: http://www.creativity.co.uk/creativity/magazine/library/diagram.htm Also, it is said that a human brain can process 7 plus or minus 2 chunks at any single moment of time. It means that, if there are too many pieces of information that need to be processed, we will probably be able to deal with them by regrouping these pieces into 5 to 9 groups, each of which contains 5 to 9 pieces of information or chunks. This enables us to deal with 25 to 81 pieces of information rather easily. Moreover, if we can create further sub-chunks on a lower logical level (this process may be called "chunking down"), then we may be able to deal with 125 (5 x 5 x 5) to 729 (9 x 9 x 9) pieces of information rather comfortably, and so forth. An interesting fact here is that if we chunk down only seven times by including seven pieces of sub-chunks in each chunk, then we will already be able to deal with 823,543 (seven multiplied by seven for seven times) pieces of information comparatively easily. It seems that so-called geniuses are people who are good at sorting these chunks in the process of learning relevant skills; they just seem to engage in the same process of selecting one choice among several, repeating it several times in a systematic way, thus exhibiting what appears to be an extremely sophisticated performance. What these geniuses are doing is therefore a relatively easy task on each level, but their systematic and coherent selection of relevant pieces of information from relevant chunks makes them what they are. This mechanism of simple patterns creating very complicated and sophisticated patterns is very similar to the process of "Fractals" discussed in the following section. Also, it is commonly observed that people usually tend to be good at either dealing only with the "forest" (patterns, or "chunking up") or only with the "trees" (details, or "chunking down"), but really holistic people are those who can balance what they do on those two levels. And it may not be so difficult as it seems, as what we need to do on both levels is the same simple operation. Incidentally, while I can explain how linguistic learning can be accelerated from the point of view of NLP methodology (this topic will be discussed in a future issue of the newsletter), the balancing between chunking up and chunking down discussed above means, as far as learning such foreign languages as English is concerned, to continually have two vectors of consciousness; one is chunking up from the level of words, and the other is chunking down from the level of syntaxes. In my own case, at any time and at any place, I seem to be understanding (hearing, speaking, reading, and writing) English exactly on the interface where these two chunking up and chunking down vectors meet each other. At present, the Japanese education system of teaching foreign languages seems to have been paying exclusive attention to the vector of chunking up, i.e., studying individual words. It is true that the syntaxes (chunking down) are taught as an individual topic at the early part of linguistic learning, but the "Columbus' eggs" like fact is hardly emphasised in the Japanese educational system that, unless one is continually aware of the chunking down from the syntactical level at real time, in order to organically combine a number of words, one cannot speak nor write intelligible sentences. It is also unimaginable in the Japanese system that the exercises to continually have the vector of chunking down can be taught to the learners of foreign languages (especially English). 3. Fractals "Fractals" are computer generated graphic designs with recursive patterns. Fractal designs are generated by performing a calculation on the basis of simple formulas. This process is repeated over and over again by inputting the result of the calculation back into the formulas. An example of a fractal image can be seen on the following Web page ("2. Fractal, #1"): http://www.creativity.co.uk/creativity/magazine/library/diagram.htm Fractal patterns are said to represent how such natural things as galaxies, hurricanes, coast lines, mountains, rivers, bushes, cauliflowers, veins, etc., are formed. They are holistic, non-linear and recursive. It seems that fractals may present a solution to the problem of universal life forms, and that they may prove to be more convincing than, for instance, a paisley-like shape, in which Wilhelm Reich, an important but greatly misunderstood psychoanalyst, once tried to identify the universal life form. From the point of view of the method for accelerated learning, fractals have a great significance in that they may be related to how some people are able to learn things quickly and easily and others are not, and that they may be helpful in accelerating the learning process. That is to say, in the above example, it was suggested that the same amount of effort and energy which a beginner tennis player may need to achieve a learning progress from 0% to 60% of the learning ratio seems to be needed for him or her to make a very small progress from 99% to 99.9% later on as a top tennis player, and this mechanism may be best understood metaphorically, by referring to the fractal diagram shown on the following Web page ("3. Fractal, #2"): http://www.creativity.co.uk/creativity/magazine/library/diagram.htm Namely, on the lowest level of this diagram, one Fractal operation can achieve a considerably big (i.e., gross) change, while on the highest level of the diagram, the same Fractal operations repeated can achieve only extremely small (i.e., subtle) changes. Further, it can be noted that the dimensions of the changes on each level are different, but the patters of these changes remain the same, just like the letters written on the surface of a balloon continue to look the same with bigger sizes, as the balloon is inflated. This fact teaches us that the same basic patterns, or the same basic way of swinging the tennis racket for that matter, need to be repeated in the same way both in the case of beginner tennis players and in the case of advanced players. Usually, people tend to believe that advanced learners must be learning and achieving such difficult things as are not achievable to other ordinary people, but it turns out that, if looked at from the above point of view, they may have just mastered a certain number (probably between five and nine) of basic techniques and have been loyally repeating these same patterns in a way that they only look complicated. Why the basic techniques repeated by advanced learners can look extremely complicated to outsiders may be explained away, if viewed from the combined point of view of Fractals and the above mentioned "chunks": Specifically, the learners who have wholly mastered say seven basic techniques can combine one of these techniques with another, and further combine the resultant "newly" learnt pattern with one of these seven techniques again. If they repeat this operation seven times, then they will already be able to achieve 823,543 (seven multiplied by seven for seven times) different patterns of learning. (If the expression "they will already be able to achieve 823,543 different patterns of learning" is not exactly correct, then it can be rephrased as "they will already acquire the flexibility to be able to achieve 823,543 different patterns of learning".) Thus, if the models of "Fractals" and "chunks" are combined, the mechanisms as to "how to learn to learn to learn" and/or how such learning processes can be accelerated can be logically elucidated, and what kind of learning attitude is required so that one's own learning process may be accelerated becomes very clear. How did you find this current issue of the newsletter? If you have questions and feedback, please contact me at magazine@creativity.co.uk. Go to Taiten Kitaoka's Official Web site. Go to the site in English: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter: "This is the Genuine NLP!". Go to the site in Japanese: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter:"". (c) Copyright 2003, Taiten Kitaoka. All rights reserved.