Nominalisations - and the Science of the Brain - by Matthew Wingett
A fascinating programme on BBC Radio 4 "Brain Culture" on 22nd November highlighted one of cutting-edge scientific studieson neuro-plasticity - and reconfirmed something that Richard Bandler has said for some time - nominalisation can get people stuck.
Matthew Wingett, Editor, NLP LIFE
Neuro-plasticity is a phenomenon that neurologists have started to understand a lot better in the last few years. And it has some real implications for what we think of ourselves as learning machines - and creatures capable of change.
Essentially neuroplasticity is the name scientists give for the fact that we continue to grow neurons throughout our lives. It means that the more we practise something and the more we learn, the more our brain grows. That might seem like commons sense to most of us, but it's a revelation for scientists, who used to believe that brain development ended in our teen years, and thereafter, the cells simply died away.
It's something that neuroscientist Chris Frith of University College London noted in his study of the brains of viola players. The longer they played and practised, the larger became those areas of the musicians' brain associated with the mental and physical co-ordination involved in playing musical instruments.
The same has been noted with London taxi drivers, who memorise "The Knowledge" of London's streets. The area of their brain associated with memory, the hippocampus, grows larger as the brain grows new connections to accommodate all those street names, and "runs" the driver has to remember.
...the right emotional attitude in the classroom can help the brain to learn more quickly...
It gets more interesting when this phenomenon meshes in with cultural attitudes.
Another of the elements which contributes to this growing of brain cells and therefore how easily the brain takes in information is in the brain's Dopamine Reward System. Scientists have found that when someone is engaged in a game where there is an element of risk or chance, the brain generates more dopamine, which in turn encourages greater "synaptic-plasticity" - which is the efficiency with which the brain makes new connections.
The upshot of it is that the right emotional attitude in the classroom can help the brain to learn more quickly.
So what does this have to do with nominalisation - the linguistic phenomenon in which a mental process is spoken about as if it is a solid thing? (See Make Your Life Great by Dr Richard Bandler, or Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H Erickson, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder for a more comprehensive description.)
Well, as further evidence shows, the effect on performance can be huge with one particular nominalisation. The one I'm thinking of is "intelligence" and its connected adjective "intelligent".
...The effect is fascinating...
Neuro-scientist Caroline Dweck of Stamford University has found that, contrary to the advice of the Self Esteem industry of the 1980s and 90s, children who were praised for having higher intelligence tended to do less well in comparison to those encouraged for having the ability to learn well.
The effect is fascinating. In a study, kids were given mental tasks to perform. Half the group were praised for their intelligence after performing them correctly, while the other half were praised for showing that they could learn new things.
...kids who were told they were intelligent became anxious when their intelligence was tested...
The tasks were gradually made more difficult. Dweck found that the kids who were praised for their intelligence became quickly disheartened when they encountered difficulties they didn't yet know how to solve, whereas the kids who were praised for their ability to learn new things approached new problems with the expectation that they would solve them.
What Dweck was noticing was that the kids who were told they were intelligent became anxious when their intelligence was tested. They became afraid of trying new tasks, in case they failed. They appeared to conceptualise their intelligence as something which was finite and which they didn't want to bump up against the limits of.
Those who were praised as good learners, thus conceiving of being intelligent as a process of learning happily engaged in new activities with a completely different attitude: that of expecting to find out more, and expecting to solve the task they were given.
By thinking of their potentials as process-driven, they didn't feel a need to protect what they already had, but rather to explore further. And of course, with this attitude of uncertainty and discovery inside them stimulating their Dopamine Reward System, they learned more quickly and went further in their studies than those who were told they had a high level of intelligence.
It's a fascinating piece of research, which once again shows how far ahead of his time Dr Richard Bandler was when he wrote about Nominalisation way back in The Structure of Magic I and Patterns of The Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H Erickson Vol 1.
So when it comes to thinking about yourself, remember this: you're an exquisite learning machine. Just like working out at a gym - learning with a feeling of excitement is going to yield fantastic results. So go for it - and feel your brain GROW!
