"The map is not the territory" - Breaking Down Reality
The map is not the territory
A term coined by Alfred Korzybski, basically implying that we are separated from reality. The map is a metaphor for our belief system, values and principles (How we view the world), the map of the world we have in our minds is not the real world but just a reflection of our beliefs. Each person has a different reality, based on the fact that we all have different maps and ways to view the world. Most people (or all of them), instead of interacting with the world, interact with their map.
Two different people can look at the same problem and see two different things. they might come with an idea for a solution and each will think he is right but in reality both could be right or wrong. There are many religions in the world, each has a different religious story with base ideals and rules, each has thousands - millions of followers, but they cant all be right... Yet, each believer is sure that his religion is the right one! He will argue for that and wont accept other Ideas.
This example talks about religion but it could be politics, ideas, music taste and basically anything ... But why is that? People has different ideas and each sure his right or has higher value based on their maps of reality.
Old lady or young lady?
NLP communication model
NLP came up with a practical model that helps us understand how we receive and process information, forming our reality and reacting to it. How we see the world? this model shows us what influence each of us to interpret the reality individually.
External event (Territory) is happening, we receive information with our five senses: sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing. The information translated to about 2 million bits of information (that's a lot of information!) and then get processed. In order for us to understand the event, our brain has to filter the information based on our values, beliefs, language, decisions and meta-programs (subject for another post), and he does that in three main ways:
Deletion:
Deletion occurs when we remove any unnecessary information. When you are looking at something you are not seeing the whole picture but only focusing on a certain point. When you talk to someone in a bar, consciously you don't hear what other people say even tho they speak loud enough because you focus on hearing your friend. Without deletion you would be overloaded with unnecessary information.
Distortion:
Not all information get received perfectly, sometimes we observe something as a different thing. Person can see a rope in nature and think its a snake. We can observe objective information and distort it to negative, positive or different information based on many things like proportion, conclusion jumping , taging and many others.
Generalization:
Maybe the main filter happening which places the information in the matching group in your brain. When you look at a door you don't need someone to explain to you what is a door, you know automatically what is a door and how its working. That's because the information get generalized and stored in order for us to understand it faster in the future. The brain always looking for the similar!
People who had bad experience with something automatically assume the result will be the same next time because they generalized the experience and formed a belief.
Internal representation
After the the information filtered we get internal representation (Our Map) about the external event. Our map is built with pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes and self talk. This is our representation of reality!
This representation of reality influence our state and our physiological state as a result. Our behaviors influenced by our state and form results.
Here's a video of Doug OBrien explaining the concept of perception and beliefs. I feel like this video can visualize many of the things I've written in here.
Now we understand the concept of subjective and individual reality! We can carefully observe ourselves and see where we have aspects of our life that are influenced by our map which has few false beliefs (We all have few of those). More importantly we can understand each other and not get angry when someone's reality doesn't match ours.
The written things have not been proven scientifically or claimed to be absolute truth. Those set of ideas and methods a person can try and see if it has an effect. This is a personal empirical prof and not scientific (yet). Would recommend simply trying those ideas and feel the positive effects it has on your life! you can base your decision on that.
What is NLP?
NLP Presuppositions
🙂Thank you for reading!🙂
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This content is not for all, I'm sure. It's difficult to understand in one go. However, thank you veru much for bringing up content like this.
My pleasure, I tried to simplify it as much as possible :)
I enjoyed this. It's great to remember this post while dealing with other people.
Thank you, try to remember it while dealing with every kind of information :P
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
- Albert Einstein
Not simple enough? :)
I got it and I'm pretty simple. It's a very interesting article, and very true. It will be interesting to see how they use these studies to teach computers to learn. As a dad, it lends good guidance how to teach as well.
Funny you said that because I was reading about AI and one of the most important discoveries they did is the importance of a body for the system, we learn through our feelings and body language and they affect each other. So it will be really interesting to see how they address this problem ;)
Thank you for the comment!
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Since talking to you, my lucid dreams have become physically blurred. My "perceived" detail is now a mere distortion. And there is a block. It's quite interesting but it's so new I have no idea what it means, I just know it has something to do with you, your posts and what my subconscious is doing to that information. If you wouldn't mind could you read my post, it's called something like "my waking life" tell me what you think? I'm curios 🙃
Sure!
I will read it later, I'm working right now on my new post :)
If I happen to forget just reply again to remind me ^^
I just scanned through it but will get back to it later again. I have become highly critical of mainstream psychology but NLP definitely works. I do not perform hypnosis on people who are under the influence of the system though, because I think it is helping the system which has huge problems.
as a certified practitioner of hypnosis and metaphilosopher and financial analyst, I am following you
Thank you very much!
I don't really like the mainstream psychology as well, does not bring great results. One of my dreams is to bring this domain into psychology and science.
Thank you again for the great comment and follow :D
Yes, like your article. Being a member in the church of perpetual astonishment NLP is a useful tool and mindset as it keeps you astonishingly curious of how the different modalities keep interacting...Will follow you and have up voted you.
Thank you very much! Happy that you liked it :D
This reminds me of the philosophy of Kant regarding the noumenal and phenomenal realms. I am not sure about his metaphysical assertions but, to be honest, was he even sure that there is a world independent of our ideas or perception. I haven't read his work extensively so please, if you do know, let me know if I am off.
I do believe it is possible that one may have portions of their map so to speak that do represent the real world. In other words, there are absolutes which we may arrive in our thinking. Do we know if they are asolutes? Perhaps not but, if absolutes do exist then it is reasonable that there is a human mind that may have a conception of them and thus possess a good portion of the map.
Maybe we all have a sliver of the map of the territory but surely no man does in toto. That is why we are able to learn from one another and cooperate. A wonderful dynamic of interpersonal relationships if I do say so myself.
Keep blogging. I like where this is going. ;)
Thank you for awesome comment brother!
About Kant's work, I did not have the chance to check it but I will.
You could say there are absolute, there are facts, and facts are true no matter what our perspective. The earth is round, that's a fact, but there are still people with the belief it's flat.
Thank you for great comment again :D
This is a very important truth. Sometimes when we changed the way we perceived the situation that we are, we become more empowered and happy. As the say goes, there are different versions of truth, why choose the one that makes us unhappy.
Agreed, if there are two kinds of illusions then I rather pick tge positive one :)
In life, we need to empower our selves.