THE POWER OF TESTING THINGS

I like NLP because it is a pragmatic discipline and one that encourages the testing of things. If you read the original NLP books, the originators constantly urged this: “Don’t take our word for things, test it for yourself. See if it works for you. If something does not work for you, keep refining it so that you customize it for you, or try something else.”

We test things constantly because if something isn’t working, maybe we have not applied the proper skills or maybe we do not yet have an accurate map of things. Korzybski (1933/ 1994) emphasized that a mental map was only as good as it could be used to navigate the territory. If your mental maps is not taking you to the places you want to go and giving you the experiences you want to have— do one of two things: First, check the map to see if it is accurate and appropriate. Second, check your skills to see if you have the appropriate competencies for using your map to navigate a certain domain.

Testing your map against reality in terms of what works, what does not work, what works poorly, what works effectively is a practical way to determine pragmatic truth. This is not absolute “truth.” It is not truth with a capital T. It is the truth of a situation, of a given context and time.

Now I write all of that because of the confusion and myths and non-sense that’s perpetuated these days about “energy.” And since I’ve been writing about power and empowerment, I figured it’s time to address some of these. The first on a controversial methodology that lots of NLP people have gotten into. You may not like what you are about to read. Yet if you are committed to testing things and not just blindly believing things, then I invite you to read with an open mind and check it out.

The story begins in 1996 when Emily Rosa watched a videotape with her mother on the growing industry called “therapeutic touch,” a controversial method of treating ailments by manipulating the patients’ “energy fields.” While a patient would lay still, a therapist would move his or her hands just inches away from the patient’s body to detect and remove “undesirable energies,” which according to those who practice this controversial method would presumably caused various illnesses.

Now Emily suggested to her mother that she might be able to conduct an experiment on such a claim. Linda Rosa, her mother was a nurse and long-standing member of the National Council Against Health Fraud gave her some advice on the method.

So this is what Emily did. She initially recruited 21 therapists and set up a test. The test involved Emily and the therapist sitting on opposites sides of a table with a cardboard screen separating them.

The cardboard screen blocked both of their views so that neither of them could see the other. The screen had holes cut out at the bottom through which the therapist would place her hands, palms up, and out of sight. Emily would flip a coin and, based on the result, placed her hand four to five inches over the therapist’s left or right hand. (This distance was marked on the screen so that Emily’s hand would be at a consistent distance from the therapist’s hand.) Then the therapists, unable to see Emily, would have to determine whether she was holding her hand over their left or right hand by feeling for her energy field. Emily reported her results at the science fair and received a blue ribbon for her science project.

Some time later Emily’s mother Linda mentioned this experiment to Dr. Stephen Barrett from the NCAHF. And he, intrigued by the simplicity of the method and the initial findings, mentioned it to the producers of the TV show, Scientific American Frontiers on PBS. For that, Emily managed to convince 7 of the original 21 therapists to take the experiment again so that the show could be taped. From 280 individual attempts by 21 separate therapists to feel Emily’s energy field, they correctly identified the position of her hand just 44% of the time. Now left to chance alone, they should get about 50% right with a 95% confidence interval of +\- 6%.

With these results, Linda and Emily thought the work might be worthy of publication. And it was. So in April, 1998, Emily had her experiment published in the JAMA. Emily reasoned that if the therapist can do what they claimed, then they must at least be able to feel the energy field. If they cannot even do that, then everything about therapeutic touch would be cast in doubt. One of the amazing things about this is that when Emily began, she was a 9-year-old working on this idea for her fourth-grade science fair project. She was 11 when her research was published and that made her the youngest person ever to have research published in the prestigious medical journal. Ah, the power of testing, the power of questioning assumptions, the power of putting a claim to the test!

Post Script Bob Bodenhamer sent the following after checking articles on Wikipedia. Emily Rosa’s name is mentioned in the first paragraph on Therapeutic Touch. And Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst concluded in their book Trick or Treatment (2008) this: "The energy field was probably nothing more than a figment in the imaginations of the healers."

References Hubbard, Douglas,W. (2010). How to Measure Anything: Finding the value of ‘intangibles’ in business. New York: Wiley & Sons, Inc. pp. 13-17. “Therapeutic Touch: Fact or Fiction?” Nurse Week, June 7, 1998. “A Child’s Paper Poses a Medical Challenge,” New York Times, April 1, 1998.