Woman: So in that situation you're suggesting that if you were working with that person you would tie in with the feeling system, the representational system?

It depends on what outcome you want. Our claim is that there are no mistakes in communication; there are only outcomes. In order for us to respond to your question you have to specify what outcome you want. If you want to establish rapport, then it would be useful to match the representational system, indicated by the predicates. The client comes in and says "Well, I feel really jealous, man, you know, and it's hard on me and I don't know what to do." You can say "Well, I'm going to try to help you get a handle on it because I feel you are entitled to that. Let's come to grips with this and really work to have some solid understanding about this." That would be a first step which would help you to establish rapport. If instead you said to that person "Well, I'm going to try to help you get a perspective on your feelings," you would not get conscious rapport. You might or might not get unconscious rapport, which is the most important one anyway.

When this man comes in with his jealousy problem and you can see the accessing cues, you have all the information you need to understand the process he goes through. Even when people begin to get an idea that this kind of stuff is going on, they don't teach people new ways to do it. If your therapist just tries to assist you in making more realistic pictures, he's working with content, and still leaving the structure intact. Most of the time people don't try to change the actual structure of the process. They try to make it "more realistic" or workable. This means that as long as the revised content remains the same they'll be fine, but when they switch content they will get into trouble again.

The way you motivate yourself may have the same structure as jealousy: you make a picture of what you want that feels good and then tell yourself how to make that picture come true. If that's so, then until you have another way to motivate yourself you are going to keep that way no matter how unpleasant it is sometimes. Even the crummiest strategy is better than none at all.

Man: What's the difference in the cerebral hemispheres as to the dominant hand and dominant eye?

Each time we do a seminar someone asks us that question. As far as I can tell, there is no research to substantiate the idea that there is eyed-ness. You won't find any research that is going to hold up. Even if there were, I still don't know how it would be relevant to the process of interpersonal communication, so to me it's not a very interesting question. Your eyes are split so that half of each eye is connected to each hemisphere. The tendency to look in a microscope with one eye or another has been noted as statistically significant; however, I don't know of any use for that information right now.

Man: What about a situation where one eye is measurably much better visually? One is practically blind and the other one is OK. Is there any correlation there with the handedness?

I don't know. I have no idea. Again, I've never found that a useful organizing principle in communication. If you know of something in that area, let me know about it.

Man: At what age do you assume that human beings establish hand dominance?

I don't. No assumptions. Linguists claim that it occurs somewhere around four and a half. I have no basis on which to substantiate that. Handedness is a dimension of experience which I know exists in the world, I have never found any useful connection to communication. There is an infinite amount of sensory experience available right here in this room. We consistently make unconscious choices about what we sample. If we didn't, we'd all be "idiot savants," who can't forget things; they can't not know things. When you ask them about anything, they have to give you a complete "dump" of all the information they have ever had on that particular topic.

Most therapy is founded on the presupposition that if you know how things came about, the roots where it all originated, that will give you a basis from which to change it. I believe that that's an accurate and limiting assumption. Yes, that is one way to go about changing, but it is only one out of an infinite number of ways to understand behavior. When people achieve handedness is in no way significant, as far as I can tell, in the process of doing therapy and communication unless what you really want to do is to teach children to be differently handed.

The only thing I've ever used handedness in is stuttering. That's the only time I've ever used it face-to-face, experientially with a kid to assist him in getting more choices. I simply noticed that if he were given a task in which it was specified he do it with this hand as opposed to that hand—and it didn't matter which hand—and he didn't have to talk simultaneously, he could do the task and then describe it. If he had to talk at the same time, or if the task involved both hands, so that there was hemispheric switching, he had difficulty.

Children do have accessing cues at a very young age, and that is relevant information to notice. There is something now that they are imposing upon children called "learning disabilities." Many of these "learning disabilities" are really functions of the educational system. For example, I was given a bunch of children who fell into the classification of "crossed hemispheres" and they told me that this was something that existed in the world. They wanted me to find out if there was any difference between these children and the rest of them, given accessing cues and so on. What I discovered is that they were all children who were trying to spell auditorily. When I said "How do you spell the word 'cat'?" they went inside and their eyes moved down and to their left. I asked the children what they were doing and they said "Sounding the word out," because they were taught to spell phonetically. You can't even spell "phonetics" phonetically!

Who here is a good speller? Somebody who used to win spelling bees? How do you spell the word "phenomena"?

Woman: I read it.

She sees it, she reads it, whichever word you use to describe it. Now, as you visualized the word "phenomena" you somehow knew that was correct. Now, change the "ph" to an "f" and tell me what changes in your experience as you see it with an "f" instead of a "ph."

Woman: It stops being a word.