CHIEF VARIABLES IN THE NEURO-SEMANTIC MODEL

The definitions of Neuro-Semantics which you just read (last week’s post) identify several variables, elements, or components that stand out as central to the Neuro-Semantic model. When you know these seven key variables, you will have an even fuller description and understanding. So here goes:

• 1) Meaning: Neuro-Semantics is all about meaning—what it is, how we call it into existence, how we create it, how we keep it within us, live it, embody it, how we can change it, suspend it, and even release it. When Korzybski said that we humans are a semantic-class of life he identified meaning as the key variable within our mind-body- emotion system that determines the conditions and quality of our life. This makes meaning absolutely crucial to how you experience life, your actions, relationships, and the significance of your life.

Meaning is not a singular thing, nor is it a linear thing. In fact, it is not a thing at all. To speak of meaning as a noun (a nominalization) falsely betrays its true nature. Meaning is a process—it is something you and I do. We make meaning. And we do so in numerous ways. As you will learn, we make meaning via associating one thing with another so that they become linked and connected. The things don’t have to be logically linked or connected. But link them, and you make that as your “meaning.” This starts the journey into the fuzzy world where you can create all kinds of “logics” (reasonings).

• 2) Neurology: It is by, and within, your nervous systems that you create meaning. Your neurology entails all of your nervous systems (central nervous system, autonomic, immune, sympathetic, parasympathetic, etc.). It also is part and parcel of your spinal chord and brain including all of the levels of your brain. Korzybski mapped the major components of the brain and identified the sequence of their functioning, how lower level impulses that enter into the brain at the thalamus and are processed by being sent to the higher levels. It is within the neurology of your body, physiology, neuro-chemistry, neuro-pathways, etc. that you construct and hold meaning. Mind-and-body together, as an integrated system, creates your neuro-semantic existence.

• 3) Performance: From the interactions of your neuro-semantic mind-body-emotion system arise your internal behaviors as you somatize your meanings into your emotions, and then react, gesture, speak, and act. All of these behaviors, micro- and macro-, comprise the feed-forward loop of communication as you turn “information” or “data’ about the world and yourself into actions. As a mind-body-emotion system, your life is a matter of information into the system and energy out. The energy out shows up as performance —this includes both actions that are healthy and effective and those that are neurotic and dysfunctional.

• 4) Development: As a neuro-semantic class of life, at birth you are born only partially developed. Your brain does not fully develop until puberty when certain hormones facilitates the maturing of your physical brain. And from infancy to young adulthood, many of your semantic dimensions develop through stages that have been well-mapped out by Developmental Psychologists. During that period, you develop cognitively, socially, sexually, and ethically. As you develop through definite cognitive-emotional stages, if you evolve in a healthy way, you move beyond the cognitive distortions of childhood and discover how to effectively cope with your basic or lower needs. Abraham Maslow identified the mechanism of deficiency as the nature of these lower needs, and if you successfully evolve beyond the lower animal needs, you move to the truly human needs—the “self-actualization” needs that operate by the mechanism of abundance, being-ness, and meaningfulness.

• 5) Self-Actualization: You are an evolutionary developmental class of life who develops by the effectiveness of your semantic mapping. First you have to create a mental model of what your needs are and how to fulfill them (chapter 9). Then you have to generate a mental model that allows you to learn, practice, and integrate accurate and effective ways to cope with those needs. Semantically coding your needs accurately brings true gratification so that you keep evolving to the next level of needs [survival, safety, social (love and affection), self, self-actualization]. That’s when you semantically code the higher needs in a way that brings out your highest visions and values in life and transfer them to your best performances.

• 6) Inner and Outer Game: A user-friendly way to talk about Neuro-Semantics is to speak the inner game of constructing your frames of meaning so that you have useful, actionable, and relevant mental models for how to cope with the demands of everyday life. This is what “learning” is all about—learning what things are, how they work, what they lead to, how they operate in social contexts, and how to cope with life’s challenges. The inner game comes first because if your understandings, beliefs, decisions, identities, intentions, etc. are wrongly formatted, then your actions will fail you as you seek to navigate the territory to which they refer. Conversely, the outer game of effective actions that produce results in all of the dimensions of life indicate that you know, understand, and have an effective strategy for that domain. Psycho-logics is the term that describes the unique meaning of your inner games. This term was created by Korzybski by hyphenating the terms psychology and psychological. When you make meaning using your neuro-linguistic mind-body-emotion states, you create a world of meaning for yourself that is “psycho-logical.” This means that from within the frames and references that you create about your world, it all makes perfect sense. It may not make useful, productive, or enhancing sense, but it makes “psycho- logical” sense as you have created a world of meaning by the way you reasoned.

As you make meaning, you do not do so only by associations and the wild forms of psycho-logics that emerge, but you do so mostly by how you mentally frame things. This refers to the higher forms of your meaning-making. You first link things, then you take that linkage inside yourself by representing it as a map of the external world. This representation operates as the way you “think”about something. Then some higher level “magic” occurs. You do not just represent things, you alter and play and manipulate and change the things you represent. You also then step back to think about those things again and again, layer upon layer. This creates higher level abstractions. And this process of reflexive thinking reflecting back onto your previous thoughts never ends. You can always think-feel about whatever you think.

As a symbolic class of life you use symbols to “stand for” things out there. Then you create symbols to stand for those symbols. This complicates things as you create internal contexts which you then use to understand and interpret things. As you create these layers of mental contexts (frames) you generate more complex conceptual understandings as your schemes and paradigms.

• 7) Modeling: Given your neuro-semantic nature, the central key to successful navigating of the territory is finding, creating, designing, and installing an effective mental model. The process of doing that is called modeling. So Neuro-Semantics is a model of how to model experiences. Neuro-Semantics, following the pioneering modeling work of Maslow (Self-Actualization Psychology) and of Bandler and Grinder (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is centrally about the modeling process (chapter 17). Primarily we model human excellence and expertise. We also can, and do, model dysfunctional experiences in order to understand the frames of meaning (beliefs, decisions, intentions, understandings, etc.) that make the dysfunctional experience work as it does. This informs us what to do to create generative change.

Neuro-Semantics provides flexible tools for tracking the vertical or higher dimensions of mental processing. It even provides models for tracking the systemic nature of mind as it moves round and round the circuits of ideas, memories, concepts, imaginations, etc. As a tool for more fully identifying the higher and ever-changing levels of human consciousness and meaning that drive behavior, Neuro-Semantics enables us to track, model, and replicate human excellence.