AH, THE THINGS YOU HAVE DISTORTED!

If you want to know how people can really create strange, weird, destructive, and even pathological mental maps— look no further than the linguistic distortions. And yet, these neuro- linguistic distinctions can also enable you to create extremely wonderful, practical, life-changing, world-changing ideas. Actually, we do not have a choice about whether we will use linguistic distortions in our mapping operations— it is inevitable. It is the way the brain works and how modeling the world works.

When you map something from the territory, you inevitable create caricatures. Sometimes it is because our drawings are not all that realistic, sometimes because a caricature better represents things, sometimes because our deleting and generalizing causes us to twist things around.