How to Shift the Meaning of Memories
Using this knowledge, you can help yourself associate positive-feeling submodalities with things that need to get done (like homework).
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison. — Marcel Proust (1871—1922)
In the last “lesson” on NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) I introduced you to the concept of sensory modalities and touched on sensory submodalities.
Understanding this is the key to a whole spectrum of useful tools and skills, from having a deeper understanding of other people’s internal worlds to knowing how to deal with emotional pain and trauma.
This improves our communication with others, and gives us new ways to increase our own resilience and deal with the crap that life can throw at us.
The real key here is understanding how sensory data interacts with and defines memory and creates meaning within and for our memories.
Different types of memories — regardless of how anchored in reality or fantasy they may be — are stored in our brains in the five sensory modalities that we have discussed (sight, smell, hearing, taste, feeling), and the subtle gradations of each sense (submodalities such as color, brightness, or contrast for the visual modality). This is true for both adults and children.
Now let’s go a little deeper into how this happens.
Our brain organizes information according to the way it’s stored. Our senses pick up something in the outside world — say we see an insect fly by. That’s an objective “thing” that we’ve “seen.” However, before that image makes its way to our conscious brain, it’s processed by other parts of the mind and tweaked and tuned. If it’s a bug that frightens us — perhaps a wasp — then the mind sees it as being bigger and in sharper contrast than it really is.
Other objects in the picture — the background, buildings, grass, whatever — become more distant, dull, perhaps less colorful. The mind may increase the volume of the sound associated with the wasp, and also attach a feeling to the image — probably a variation on what we interpret as fear or panic, a feeling felt, perhaps, in the pit of the stomach, or a trembling of the hands.
Here’s a quick list of types of qualities specific to the submodalities that we commonly use to experience reality and store memory:
Visual: color or black-and-white, contrast, size, bordered or not, moving or still, brightness, graininess, distance from us, associated or disassociated (do we see the scene as we saw it, or do we see ourselves in it in our memory), focus, detail, texture, perspective, dimensionality (flat or 3-D), proportion
Auditory: loudness, tonality, distance, pitch, melody, inflection, location, tempo, duration
Gustatory: salty, sweet, spicy, musty, bitter, familiar (associated with particular named food or taste), delicate
Olfactory: strong, faint, intermittent, familiar, unique, musty, moist, damp, mildewy
Kinesthetic: hard, soft, cool, warm, sharp, electric, intensity, duration, speed, location
Changing “reality”
Now here’s the amazing part.
If you know what modalities and submodalities you use to store a particular type of memory — happy, sad, hopeful, afraid, neutral, whatever — then you can “adjust” the memories you have of the past to change their emotional feel. As we will see later, this can be used to powerful effect when it comes to even the strongest phobias and traumas.
For example, think of a memory of something you did in the recent past, such as brushing your teeth last night. Mental list the quality of the submodalities.
Your list may look something like mine: I see a still picture in black-and-white, without a lot of contrast or detail, associated (I can see the mirror and sink, but not myself), no border, 3-D, about two feet square, about twenty feet away from me, can hear the sound of the water running, taste the mint of the toothpaste. If I concentrate on it, I can remember (or imagine) the feeling of the toothbrush on my gums, and the smell of the toothpaste.
The feelings I associate with that memory are pretty neutral. Boredom may be the best way to describe it. It’s something I do every night.
Now imagine a control panel just below the image, or wherever you’d like it to be, with dials and levers that you can use to change the various submodalities.
Reach out and change a few of the submodalities and see how things change! When I move the picture from black-and-white to color, I suddenly feel curious and interested in the process of brushing my teeth. It seems fascinating. If I turn up the volume, I become uneasy. As I increase the mint taste, I feel more awake.
Nobody knows why this works the way it does. One theory is that the brain stores information holographically, rather than digitally, and so the brain “sees” its own storage capacity as a three-dimensional space.
Because we experience the world through our senses, it makes sense that we’d also organize the mechanism for storing the information about our experience of the world along sensory lines as well. When something is put into a particular space, it acquires the sensory nature of that space, since sensory signals are how we experience the world.
So when a memory is put into the “boring” category in our brain, it becomes (in my case: everybody is different) black-and-white still pictures and all the other submodalities described above.
When the submodalities are adjusted and the pictures is turned into a color movie, it doesn’t just change the memory: it actually causes it to interconnect with or slide to a different storage place in the holographic brain.
Critical Submodalities
There’s also a concept known as a critical submodality. This is the submodality which has the ability to shift others, probably the primary hook into the place in the brain hologram where the memory is stored.
As you’re going through the various submodalities, changing each one a bit in one way and then another, turning up and then down the brightness, volume, etc., you’ll notice that there is generally one particular one — it could be anything from volume to contrast to smell to brightness to anything — that causes the entire picture to “change” and creates a sudden shift in the feelings associated with that memory.
That submodality is the critical submodality, and once you know what your critical submodalities are, you can do this process much quicker.
One of the most common and most powerful critical submodalities is location. When you move a picture from where it is (for example, in front and to the right, about four feet away) to some other place (for example, to the front, up slightly above the eyes, only a foot away) it often dramatically changes its impact.
Making fast, permanent changes
If you took that boring memory and changed the submodalities so that the emotions associated with it changed, and then you left it that way, you probably have permanently changed the nature of that memory.
If you do it a few times, you will definitely permanently (until you tweak the submodalities again) change the memory. As you ask your children how they store their memories, you’ll discover the types of submodalities they associate with particular states, as well.
Using the tooth-brushing or other “boring” memory, you now know how you or your child encode and store boring memories. Do a reality-check by bringing up a few other boring memories, and see if they’re the same.
Once you’ve determined the common submodality elements among all your boring memories, note the submodality details. This is important information for you to remember — you may even want to write it down.
Changing our stories and those of our children
Everybody’s had the experience of seeing two different people react to the same thing, but in different ways. Say an insult to two different children, and you’ll get two different responses. One child may become indignant, or hurt, or angry. Another may think it a joke, or turn it into a witticism and throw it back at you.
One person, getting cut off in traffic by a reckless driver, will yell and scream and wave their fist and lay on their horn. Another will simply slow down and let the driver have some space between their car and his. It’s a fact of life that different people react to different situations in different ways … and that the same person is capable of reacting to the same stimuli in a variety of different ways.
There have been times in your life when you and your children have decided — chosen — how to react to things.
In order to make this choice, you may have repeated to yourself over and over again a particular saying or story, such as, “He’s just a jerk,” or, “This isn’t really worth worrying about.”
There have been times when you could have been hurt or wounded by somebody’s unthinking behavior, and instead you chose to simply be amused by it or to ignore it.
There have been times when you took control of the stories you told yourself about the meaning of events, people, and things. If you think back and look for one of those times, you’ll probably discover that there’s a feeling of personal empowerment associated with that memory.
Now, examine the memory for its submodalities. Unless your brain is wired in a very unusual way, you’ll discover that there are some submodalities that are the same and some that are different. Don’t fiddle with the submodalities of this memory at the moment, as it’s a memory of strength and power, and you want to keep as many of those around as you can. But do make a note of the submodalities associated with that memory. How bright is it? How far away? Is it in color or black-and-white? Is it a movie or a still picture?
Now, pull up a memory of a time that was moderately uncomfortable, perhaps a bit embarrassing or whatever is “not a big deal” but “something to avoid” for you. Notice its submodalities.
Now use your control panel to change the submodalities of the uncomfortable picture to be the same as those of the time when you felt bored or nonplussed about the event, such as brushing your teeth.
Notice that we are not dealing with content here — you don’t need to move the car or house from picture A into picture B. We’re just dealing with the submodalities, the qualitative details of the picture, sound, taste, smell, and touch of the memory.
If you’re like most people, you’ll have just changed the emotional charge of the memory from one of discomfort to one of boredom. What a useful skill!
Try it with your child if you’d like — you can always “put things back the way they were” if you hit an uncomfortable submodality. This can also be a useful way of changing the emotional state a child has associated with a particular teacher or topic.
Moving it into the future
Now imagine something you have to do in the near future, which you don’t feel particularly good or bad about. Some small job or detail, other than the tooth-brushing or whatever that you’ve been using as your calibration standard up to now.
Notice when you bring up your imagination of that job that it probably shares the submodality qualities of your memories of past boring or no-big-deal events. If it’s different, at least it probably shares a critical submodality.
Now use your control panel to adjust the submodalities of that future imagination to be the same as those of your “power” memory. Notice how you can move into a future event a feeling of empowerment, strength, or whatever you prefer.
This use of submodalities is widely known in the advertising industry, although it’s rarely mentioned outside the circles of Madison Avenue.
During the Bush/Dukakis campaign, for example, the Bush campaign used some folks who know about these technologies to develop ads which always showed Michael Dukakis in black-and-white with a frame around him, and George Bush always full-screen color. Other Republican ads showed pictures of “nice things” like kids on swings or happy family gatherings in color, full-screen, creating that submodality “anchor” for feeling good.
Still other ads showed prison inmates in black-and-white with a border around them. The graininess, contrast, brightness, and background sounds were carefully controlled to be identical when an inmate or Michael Dukakis was on the screen, and then differently identical when George Bush and the idealized American family was on the screen. Voters “knew in their hearts” who was the man for them.
The practice is not, of course, limited to political advertising: it’s just more obvious and easy to spot there. But it underlies virtually all television advertising now, as these technologies are well known in the TV world.
Similarly, filmmakers mark out the emotional high-points of a film.
In a horror film, for example, the viewer is trained in the first few scenes as to what music and visual production values (submodalities) mean danger, look out, run-cause-we’re-all-gonna-die!
These same anchors are then used in each following scene, and they gain strength each time they’re used, until the movie doesn’t even have to have a threatening scene on camera, but only a grainy picture with quick shots back and away and a particular music in the background, to get everybody in the theater squirming in their seats.
Using this knowledge, you can help yourself associate positive-feeling submodalities with things that need to get done (like homework). And you’ll find yourself starting to be aware of the subtle effect that anchors, locations, and submodalities have on how you and can take control of the experience of life.