YOU AND YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND

From the very beginning, NLP has had a love–hate relationship to consciousness. It began with the theme “run your own brain.” Then it added, “Trust your unconscious mind, it is the source of infinite resources.” Early in the history of NLP, as in the Cognitive sciences and Cognitive Psychology, it was said that consciousness is limited. In fact, this insight was repeatedly stated over and over as if this was news or a fact of immense importance. Yet it is neither.

Actually, this was one of the initiating facts that George Miller discovered at the beginning of the Cognitive Psychology movement in 1956. That was the year he published the paper, “The Magic Number 7+/-2.” That was the number of things that we humans, typically, can hold in mind consciously at any given moment. NLP picked up on that, and quoted that fact when NLP was launched into the world in the mid-1970s.