ALFRED KORZYBSKI AND SEMANTIC REACTIONS

You know what a reaction is. But what is a semantic reaction? It is a reaction to something due to its semantic meanings. You are reacting not because something has impacted you, but because something means something to you. And, you were the one who created that semantic reaction within yourself! That’s because you have attributed some meaning to some stimulus (a word, action, tone, experience, concept, etc.) and now you are unthinkingly reacting. Now instead of thinking, considering, and being mindful of the stimulus and even your thoughts about it and keeping your thinking current, you are reacting. And you are doing so unthinkingly.

Now in analyzing how this process works, Korzybski said that a person has identified two things which exist at different logical levels. That is, you have treated those two different things as if they were the same or equivalent. To you they are identical. There’s no distinction between them. NLP later recognized as a “complex equivalent” and the NLP formula E.B. = I.S. (External Behavior equals Internal State) lies at the of reframing (which is fully developed in the book, Mind-Lines: Lines for Changing Minds).

Yet a semantic reaction of this sort is not innocent nor is it harmless. Actually it creates all sorts of emotional distresses— distresses that are self-made and unnecessary. Korzybski wrote: “Through wrong evaluation we are using the lower centres [of our nervous processes] too much and cannot ‘think’ properly. We are ‘over-emotional,’ we get easily confused, worried, terrorized, or discouraged; or else we become absolutists, dogmatics, etc. ... Owing to wrong evaluation we add self-made semantic difficulties to the difficulties which we actually find in nature. When we live in a delusional world, we multiple our worries, fears, and discouragements, and our higher nerve centres, instead of protecting us from over- stimulation, actually multiply the semantic harmful stimuli indefinitely.” (S&S, p. 481)

Here we “cannot think properly” because we are only using our lower nerve centers. Conversely, by “proper thinking,” Korzybski means using your higher nerve centers—those that are associated with the executive functions of your cortex and prefrontal lobes. He means the advanced thinking of an adult who thinks things through, reasons well, checks contexts, chooses what is ecological, etc.

“Roughly the central part of the brain which we call the thalamus is directly connected with the dynamic world through our ‘senses’ and with those semantic manifestations which we usually call ‘affective,’ ‘emotions,’ all of which manifest themselves as dynamic.” (Ibid)

The thalamus and other lower structures in the lower part of the brain create a very different picture of the world than the picture derived in the higher levels. That world is emotional—dynamic,

shifting, in flux, etc.

“The cortex which gives us the static verbal reactions and definitions, is not connected with the outside world directly but receives all impulses through the thalamus. On semantic levels the thalamus can only deal with dynamic material, the cortex with static. Obviously the optimum working of the human nervous system, which represents cyclic chain, where the lower centres supply the material for the higher centres and the higher centres should influence the lower, we must have means to translate the static into dynamic and the dynamic into static; a method supplied exclusively by mathematics.” (S&S, p. 758)

For an optimum functioning we need both the higher and the lower functioning of the brain. And for holistic thinking, we need them communicating back and forth between each other. This, in fact, is the secret for a higher level of quality thinking— being able to translate up and down the levels of the brain. Korzybski said that intelligence itself requires passing from level to level in both directions. That lies at the heart of “proper training in consciousness of abstracting.” (Ibid., p. 486).

What’s the reason for this? When you can distinguish the level of the “abstracting” (thinking, generalizing, etc.), then you will not be identifying and that eliminates the semantic reaction. That’s why the most basic semantic reactions are the Cognitive Distortions— awfulizing, personalizing, emotionalizing, etc. These are actually the characteristic ways that children think! Yet for them it is okay. Children have not yet developed the capacity or maturity to distinguish levels. And that’s also why Korzybski asked about your “semantic age” (Ibid., p. 149). “How old are you anyway, semantically?” Semantic reactions indicate childhood thinking, not adult thinking and responding.

If the lower nerve centers in the brain process data so that it registers as more fluid and dynamic and if the higher in a more static code, then translating dynamic information upward and stable generalizations downward gives you a fuller and richer understanding. It’s like a movie. When you watch it, you experience it as dynamic, moving, and fluid. Yet when you stop the movie, when you freeze-frame moments in the movie—you can detect the finite differences. At the lower levels, you have variance at every moment, conversely at the higher levels you have “invariance” (Ibid., p. 292, 230, 578).

Both levels are needed in your thinking and responding. The lower levels gives you a sense of continuity where you swim in an ever-shifting and non-permanence of details. The higher levels arrests the pictures to give you stable (or static) understandings— ideas and principles that are permanent at that level. We inevitably and naturally move upward to draw conclusions. Yet if you made those conclusions permanent and unchangeable and identify them with what is “outside and beyond the nervous system, then you create for yourself semantic reactions.

If, however, when you encounter the ever-moving, shifting, and dynamic world “out there” and then move that information upward as you draw conclusions and then be ready to extensionalize those static representations, you will keep yourself current to the ever-changing territory. Knowing this explains why we have several processes for dancing up and down the levels in the Cognitive Make- Over training for Executive Thinking,