Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [425]
Still, some evidence existed that learning might take place during the lighter stages of sleep. One researcher, some years ago, treated a group of nail biters by playing, three hundred times a night while they were asleep, for fifty-four nights, a recording of the message “My fingernails taste terribly bitter.” Forty percent of the group stopped biting their nails. A possible explanation: Since most people’s sleep ranges through different levels in the course of a night, learning had taken place during periods of lighter sleep. The NRC committee’s conclusions:
The committee finds no evidence to suggest that learning occurs during verified sleep (confirmed as such by electrical recordings of brain activity). However, waking perception and interpretation of verbal material could well be altered by presenting that material during the lighter stages of sleep. We conclude that the existence and degree of learning and recall of materials presented during sleep should be examined again.
As it has been, again and again, sometimes with positive and sometimes negative results. The reason for this inconsistency has been clarified in a major new work, Memory: The Key to Consciousness, by psychologists Richard F. Thompson and Stephen A. Madigan:
An important qualification in many of these studies is that no measures were taken of whether the person was actually asleep or instead had been wakened to some degree by the taped message. One recent experiment on learning during sleep eliminated these problems by monitoring the electrical activity of the brain while word lists were read repeatedly to sleeping subjects, and making sure that the subjects remained in REM sleep. The results of the experiment were clear: There was no evidence for any kind of memory formation for events that occurred during sleep, in tests of either implicit or explicit memory.95
But, of course, as with all beyond-the-fringe psychological gimmickry, plenty of sleep-learning applications are for sale on the Net. To which one can only say: Let the sleeper beware.
Neurolinguistic programming: This system of procedures, originally developed by two reputable psychotherapists, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, is marketed by a large number of individuals and firms in many countries as training in a set of valuable skills. The trainers do a lively business teaching it for a fee at NLP workshops, seminars, and institutes.
The aim of NLP, as expressed by its proponents and teachers, is often as opaque as pea soup: It provides, they say, “a general philosophy and approach (together with tools and methodologies) that will assist a person seeking change to find a path through an unfamiliar landscape to a goal which he or she desires but lacks a means to reach.”96 In reality, its appeal is practical and, in some eyes, Machiavellian.
The use of NLP is said to increase one’s influence and effectiveness in dealing with other people. Its core concept is that people, in their mental and physical activities, use particular sensory systems—visual, auditory, tactile, and so on—to represent to themselves the material they are dealing with. According to NLP theory, they are most strongly influenced by materials presented in whatever representational system they prefer or are using at the moment. The person trained in NLP relies on clues like eye movements, posture and respiration rate, and language. With this information he or she practices “mimesis” (mimicking the other person’s posture, respiration rate, and choice of metaphors), and “anchoring” (a form of conditioning to elicit a specific response) and thereby enlarges his or her influence over the other person’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions. The technique has great appeal, for obvious reasons, to executives,