THE CODE

When you speak with any human being and carry on a conversation about anything, that person has and uses a code that governs his thinking, perceiving, understanding, deciding, etc. As the human race we have always known, well at least for thousands of years, that the code involved words and metaphors. So we listened to the words and metaphors to understand the person’s meanings. Later in human history it became common knowledge that people also use visual images. Then with NLP we discovered that the code actually involves all of the person’s senses—images, sounds, sensations, even smells and tastes.

With the NLP discovery of the sensory-based foundation for the internal code, we discovered the “languages” of the mind. In the first NLP books this was described as the sensory representational systems and the linguistic representational systems. And with that we had the NLP Communication Model. This is what John Grinder later began calling the classic code of NLP. In 1983 he felt it was insufficient and so he added some other pieces to it and called it “the new code.” He primarily added the perceptual positions. That was 32 years ago.