Revealing State Secrets To Teachers

© Richard Bolstad

“Art of the State” Teaching

As you think back over your life, I wonder how often you’ve met a teacher who is utterly inspired by her or his work. One year at high school I had a maths teacher who considered, like Pythagoras, that the fundamental principles of the universe were mathematical. To him, mathematics was a passion. And rather than just studying the syllabus, that year my class ended up being entranced by stories about everything from Greek philosophy to Quantum physics. It was the only year I ever enjoyed mathematics. The text books were the same, but this teacher made them seem like a door to life itself. A teacher is not a mobile text book. A teacher is what brings information to life. My mathematics teacher understood that teaching is the art of changing people’s state.

In the 1950s, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was a teacher of physics at the University of Chicago. He had already made his name from a paper he wrote travelling between Calcutta and London in the 1930s; the paper that explained the physics behind black holes. But in the 1950s he was living near the University’s main observatory, eighty miles from Chicago itself. There were very few physicists in the world who were up with the state of the art when it came to Chandrasekhar’s specialties. And he wanted to change that. That winter, he set himself the goal of teaching an advanced seminar in astrophysics. Unfortunately, only two students signed up for it. For Chandrasekhar, coming to Chicago meant travelling through snow for eighty miles on back country roads. The University assumed he would cancel the seminar. But he did not. He travelled there and back twice a week, all semester. 

The full results of what Chandrasekhar did as a teacher that year were not to be known for nearly thirty years. Even today, there are teachers who probably changed your life forever; and yet may not even realise it yet. How did they do that? This article is about the art of changing learners’ states of mind.

What is a State?

Before we think about how teachers elicit and change states, lets get clear what we mean by a state. The NLP term “state”, is defined by O’Connor and Seymour (1990, p 232) as “How you feel, your mood. The sum total of all neurological and physical processes within an individual at any moment in time. The state we are in affects our capabilities and interpretation of experience”. Robert Dilts (1983, Section 1, p 60-69, Section 2, p 39-52, Section 3, p 12 and 49-51) suggests that a person’s state is  a result of the interplay between accessing and representational systems, and other brain systems. Older theories assumed that this interplay must occur in a particular place in the brain; a sort of control centre for “states”. It was clear by the time of Dilts’ writing that this was not quite true. A state (such as a certain quality of happiness, curiosity or anxiety) is generated throughout the entire brain, and even removal of large areas of the brain will not stop the state being able to be regenerated.

Ian Marshall (1989) provides an update of this idea based on the Quantum physics of what are called “Bose-Einstein condensates. The simplest way to understand this idea is to think of an ordinary electric light, which can light up your room, and a laser, which with the same amount of electricity can beam to the moon or burn through solid objects. The difference is that the individual light waves coming off a normal light are organised in a laser into a coherent beam. They all move at the same wavelength in the same direction.

It seems that states in the brain are a result of a similar process: protein molecules all across the brain vibrate at the same speed and in the same way. This forms what is called a Bose-Einstein condensate (a whole area of tissue which behaves according to quantum principles; see Bolstad, 1966). This vibration results in a coherent state emerging out of the thousands of different impulses processed by the brain at any given time. Instead of being simultaneously aware that your knee needs scratching, the sun is a little bright, the word your friend just said is the same one your mother used to say, the air smells of cinnamon etc etc (like the electric light scattering everywhere), you become aware of a “state”. This “state” sort of summarises everything ready for one basic decision, instead of thousands.

Learning States

In this light, the importance of states for learning becomes obvious. The right state will form a coherent vibration throughout the brain, and allow you to generate new learnings. Without this coherence, ideas just bounce around anywhere. What my mathematics teacher did was create a laser-like coherence in my brain (which, to be frank, had fired fairly randomly through most mathematics classes before that).

A considerable amount of research suggests that certain states are useful to learning; generally relaxed and positively interested states. A Stanford University study (Jensen, 1995, p 178) showed that memory retention from a 3 hour training course increases by 25% when the students do a relaxation process before. J. O’Keefe and L. Nadel found (Jensen, 1995, p 38) that  positive emotions enhance the brain’s ability to make cognitive maps of (understand and organise) new information.

Dr James McGaugh, psychobiologist at UC Irvine notes that even injecting rats with a blend of emotion related hormones such as enkephalin and adrenaline means that the rats remember longer and better (Jensen, 1995, p 33-34). He says “We think these chemicals are memory fixatives…. They signal the brain, “This is important, keep this!”… emotions can and do enhance retention.” Another important ingredient in the emotional mix is uncertainty or even confusion. Al Bigge reports that over a number of studies, the state he calls “positive dissatisfaction” (the learner is puzzled but not yet frustrated) is correlated with the highest levels of learner involvement and learning (Jensen, 1995, p 85). On the other hand, anxiety and competition are negatively correlated with learning in numerous studies (Jensen, 1995, p 222-231).

Another important thing to understand about learning and states is that learnings are linked to the state we learn something in. Stanford University psychologist Gordon Bower and New York City University researcher Howard Erlichman are amongst the many to confirm that each emotional state binds information. Bower explains (Jensen, 1995, p 170) “It’s as though the two states constitute different libraries…. A given memory record can be retrieved only by returning to that library, or physiological state, in which the event was first stored.” If you drank a lot of coffee, or stayed in your bedroom, or fell in love, while learning something, re-entering that original state will retrieve the information.

Teaching is Like…

One NLP based way to study teaching as an art of shifting states is to use analogy. Okay; let’s think about this. Who else (other than teachers) have, as their main task, shifting people from one state to another? Yes, I know: Allied furniture removals. But seriously… as an NLP practitioner, I hope hypnotherapists immediately leap into your mind. (This is such a common problem for me that I’m thinking of charging them rent).

So we could study hypnotherapy in order to identify the structure of shifting state. Of course, that’s been done before, so now, as the Monty Python team would say, for something completely different. Who else has, as their main task, shifting people from one state to another? That’s right! Great idea! Comedians. In this article, I have taken one example session from each of these analogous situations, in order to model the process used to lead people to different states.

Hypnosis: Milton Erickson’s brief work with a hypnotherapy trainee called “George” in August, 1977 (Lankton & Lankton, 1983, p 112-124)
Comedy: Billy Connolly’s 90 minute session at the Royal Albert Hall in London, in July 1987 (Reid, 1987)

George Considers Divorce

Lets start with the hypnotherapy, so I can lower the tone of our article later. George, a psychology teacher, had asked medical hypnotherapist Milton Erickson for help because he was considering a divorce after 12 years of marriage. He wanted to make sure he was “doing the right thing”. George spoke in a very timid voice.

Erickson began in a puzzling manner by referring to a lithograph on the wall of his bedroom. This picture, entitled “The Beachcomber”, apparently showed a stick found in the mud by the artist, Amil. Amil had been searching through Michigan (the state that George came from, “coincidentally”) for something to paint. Twelve times (the same number as the years George had been married) Amil found he had unconsciously driven back to a place where this “stick in the mud”  stood on the edge of a marsh. Finally, he decided this was a message from his unconscious mind, and took it back and made the lithograph. The lithograph showed the stick in a position that made it look like something quite different; like a man striding down a beach. Erickson repeated enigmatically, “And it took him twelve trips.” As Erickson described all this, George became motionless and relaxed, his attention fixated on the speaker.

Erickson then told George that Amil had won an international prize for one of his paintings. Apparently by way of clarification, he then explained how carefully Amil planned his paintings, keeping the designs on envelopes in his pocket. Amil also knew that a painting took him about 70 hours to do. One day at noon, Amil decided to begin work on a circus painting that he’d been designing. He nailed a canvas to a frame and began eating a sandwich. He reached down to take a second bite of his sandwich and discovered that the sandwich was suddenly dry and hard. With amazement he discovered that it was actually now 6pm, and the painting was finished. He had completed it in a trance.  Amil told this story to Erickson in a state of considerable shock, saying that he hadn’t even finished planning the painting. Erickson looked at the picture and replied, “Amil, if I’m correct tell me so…”

As the current Erickson told this story to George, he looked up at this point, and George nodded and smiled. Erickson carried on, explaining how he had checked with Amil about the colours in the painting. Erickson described the circus in some detail, saying that it included a clown standing beside a girl on a horse, a merry-go-round, and a dog. The colour blue on the clown’s jacket, on the merry-go-round and on a ribbon attached to the horse’s tail were the same. Erickson then explained that Amil’s first wife had treated him “like the south end of a north bound horse”, had made a clown out of him, and had kept him on a merry-go-round never knowing what would happen. As the current Erickson said each of these things, George again nodded and smiled.

Erickson then explained that by painting the picture, Amil got something out of his system. Actually, he said, it was this circus picture that won Amil the international award. He carried on to explain that Amil’s second marriage was very happy. When Amil had hostile and insulting letters arrive from his first wife, Erickson said he had solved this in a characteristically Ericksonian way. Erickson had invited Amil to add even worse words to the accusations, and return the letters to his first wife. This technique, it was explained, had worked for Erickson on other occasions. He gave a more detailed example of his using it with angry hospital attendants he had fired from a job, including quoting some of the words he had added.

Finally, Erickson returned to describing the lithograph of the stick, which (though Amil hadn’t realised it at first) looked like a man walking down the beach.

The Structure of Erickson’s Metaphors

Clearly, the telling of these stories (even the regular rhythm of Erickson’s voice) produced a state change in George. And by identifying with Amil in the story, he was able unconsciously to think through his problem. In fact, Milton also had carried on a two way discussion with George. He had actually asked George to give him a signal to mean “What you are saying is correct.” George responded to this by nodding. As Erickson then described the way Amil’s wife treated Amil, George could confirm that this was true for George’s relationship with his own wife, by nodding again. Erickson was then able to offer suggestions about how to handle that kind of situation. The sequence that Erickson’s storytelling went through is intriguing, and familiar to most NLP trainers. He began one story, wandered onto another, and then returned to the original story at the end. Diagrammed, it would look like this:

There is another component to what Erickson has done here. At various times, he has described a situation in enough detail so that George can imagine being there. As Erickson shifts from story to story on his way “in” to the centre, the state he describes for George becomes more intense. At the initial break-off point of the “Stick in the mud” story, Erickson has created a sense of mystery perhaps, with his suggestive way of restating “And it took him twelve trips…” It’s like saying “This is important for you!” As a result, George’s attention becomes fixated on Erickson.

The mention of the international prize creates curiosity, because Erickson carries on talking about Amil’s painting design process, as if somehow this will explain how the prize came about. At the break-off point of describing the painting process, Erickson describes Amil in a state of shock, as he reports that he has gone into a profound trance! The sequence of these states that Erickson “elicits” in George by his initial storytelling goes:

Fixation > Curiosity > Entranced Shock

This sequence is actually Erickson’s trance induction (state shifting). Instead of doing a formal induction, he has simply told a sequence of stories in which deeper trance phenomena are gradually described.

Erickson then takes some time to describe the circus in the painting. He “associates” George back into the feeling of being at a Circus. He then attaches (or “anchors” in NLP terms) that state, that “meaning” to George’s marriage. When George thinks of his marriage after this, it will tend to feel like a bit of a circus.

Finally, the way that Erickson shifts from story to story is worth noting. For example, on the way “out” he shifts from the story of Amil’s divorce to the story of his own coping with angry employees (who have been fired; a situation analogous to being divorced). His words as he shifts are “…And she stopped writing. She couldn’t stand seeing her writing with those additional words added. And it’s like a trick I use or a manoeuvre or a manipulation or a trait, one term for it that I’ve employed. At Elouise I had to discharge some old timers who weren’t doing their work….”

In linguistic terms, what Erickson has done to shift from one story to another is to chunk up from one detail in the first story to a general idea, and then chunk down to another example of that idea (see above).

He sometimes uses a far simpler connection, such as a word. To connect the Elouise story with the stick in the mud again, he just says, “….So I always improved their insults… And he didn’t know how to improve on that stick….”

Billy and the Shark

Erickson himself uses humour repeatedly (for example saying that Amil’s first wife had treated him “like the south end of a north bound horse”). When I first saw Billy Connolly live, I was struck by the fact that there was something very “Ericksonian” about what he did. Connolly is an irreverent Scottish comedian, and the show that we are studying here was presented for several nights at the Royal Albert Hall in July 1987. Connolly begins in an unusual way, by playing a tune on a banjo. He then discusses what it’s like for him as a former welder from Glasgow to be performing at such a prestigious hall. While discussing this, he occasionally lowers his head and frowns, looking upwards in a puzzled way. The audience then bursts into laughter, to which Connolly responds “What are you laughing at?” (more laughter). In NLP terms, he has fired a pre-existing anchor for laughter; using a facial expression which the audience has seen him use previously after telling a joke.

Unfortunately, in this article I can’t convey to you fully the state that Connelly builds. He jokes about what it’s like to be famous, in America and in Britain. He says repeatedly that he worries a lot, but not about nuclear war and world affairs, which he takes for granted are a disaster. By failing to say what it is he actually worries about, a sense of undisclosed anxiety is generated. Next, Connolly moves on to discuss his own country, telling a series of jokes about bagpipes, the county of Fife, the Methil steel works and linoleum factories, and the carpets you can buy in London. Each subject has a number of smaller jokes with their own punchlines of course. He digresses to explain that thick pile carpets are no good with children; and we find ourselves then hearing stories about times when Connolly has feared for his children’s lives, or his own life. Now we are back on the subject of worries, and Connolly moves to his central anecdote.

This story involves him being on holiday in Barbadoes with his children. At first, he enjoyed scuba diving and watching the fish there. However, after his daughter got the video “Jaws” out, he began to hear heavy cello music when he was in the water. One day, while snorkelling, he had the awful feeling that there was something behind him. He turned to see a huge black fin only a few feet behind him. In panic he fled to the shore (“I went though the water like a torpedo; as I got nearer the shore I was throwing children behind me…”). Finally, he recovered enough to look round, and discovered that the “fin” had been his own flipper.

This shifts him back to concluding the previous story about worries of having children, and then the carpet in London. Realising what is happening with the revisited stories, the audience laughs again. Here is Connolly’s “explanation”: “Right, so… But anyway, this carpet in Liberties [laughter] People say, you know, “I’ve seen you before and you have an extraordinary memory, extraordinary.” Well, I’m going to tell you; I don’t often tell audiences this; I have no memory at all. The trick is to just keep flannelling until you remember what you were talking about in the first place. And people say, “What a technique”. I always get found out on television because their time has me totally buggered, and the titles come on and I’m still half way through a story.”

From Chinese carpets, we shift to a series of stories about sex, before (curiously) we are back at the Methil steel works in Fife. After the obligatory British jokes about bodily functions, the show then ends with Connelly playing a tune on a zither. He rationalises this conclusion by calling it “a crass attempt to leave you in the same way you were when I came in.” In fact, the sequence is hardly crass; it is precisely the design Erickson used above. Diagramatically, Connolly’s sequence is:

Once again, the method by which Connolly moves from story to story is by chunking up and then down into a new story. Consider this shift (slightly edited) from the Chinese carpet story to the stories about sex: “…I said “How much is it?” He said “Fifteen thousand pounds.”… I had to get out of the room, because the welder was coming back. I could feel the hair coming out of my tee-shirt. Every hormone in my body was standing on end, dying to scream, “For a fucking carpet!!!” because, you see, my first house was six hundred and fifty pounds for Christ’s sake. You know; Where are we living? The world’s gone bonkers. Have you noticed this? The world’s changing. They’ve got films on television urging us to wear condoms. I don’t even like them. I hate the buggars. I mean, once, if your mother found one of those in your pocket she would have had a coronary! Now, there’s mothers forcing them into their…. “Have you got your condoms?”… “Oh, mother, for…. I’m with my girlfriend.” “Here, have some; here…” … I personally dislike them. I don’t like the smell, do you? Why are they such a horrible smell? It smells like burning rubber doesn’t it…. Or maybe that’s just me…. Please; no, please don’t be embarrassed. I like to talk about sex…”

Like Erickson, Connolly is skilled at associating his listeners into a state and then anchoring it. He particularly aims at anchoring humour, of course, and this he does by firing an anchor while the audience is laughing, and then simply repeating the word or gesture again and again to build laughter later. Anchors used this way include swear words (which thus seem immensely more funny when said by him), a gesture where he turns around as if laughing to himself, and certain specific gestures such as a demonstration of attempting to put on a condom.

Again, the sequence leading to the Shark story has an interesting build-up from elicited state to elicited state. Accepting that the main state is humour, there is a sort of undercurrent of tension from the initial comments about whether famous people have anxieties, to mention of nuclear war, to life and death fears about children, to the shark story. The stories about Scotland and about floor coverings are an apparent respite from this build-up.

Worry > Nuclear war > Risk of deaths of children/self > Shark attack

Because much of Connolly’s humour depends on gestures, each story has it’s own set of gestures and postures, which trigger (anchor) the re-emergence of the same state when the story is picked up again. On the way “out” the ends of these same stories demonstrate a sequence of resolution, starting with Connolly’s discovery that the “fin” was only a part of him, and the discovery that his fear of cancer was a result of his loveable little child sitting on his chest while he was asleep. The sequence (or “strategy” in NLP terms) goes:

Worry > Anxiety > Fear of Death > Terror > Insight > Compassion

The Art of Teaching Redefined

Stand-up Comedy, Hypnosis and Teaching have much in common. In fact, a case could be made for including each of the two above examples in all three categories. I am certainly not saying that the structure I describe is the only one used in these three fields to shift listeners’ state. It is just one, highly successful, model. This structure, which we call Embedded Loops, is outlined elsewhere for use in NLP training (in O’Connor and Seymour, 1994, p 75-77). To conclude, I would like to extract some important conclusions about its use, from the two examples.

1. Identify the objectives for your teaching. Erickson was clear, before he began, that his session was to assist George in clarifying issues about his divorce. Erickson’s choice of stories was based on this content. Metaphors are not content-free tools. His stories have a certain isomorphism (similar shape) with the structure of George’s dilemma.  If we consider the “content” of Connolly’s session to be dealing with fear, the same is true there.
2. Identify the states you intend to elicit. As people listen to your stories, they associate into the states you describe. Erickson’s detailed description of the circus, and Connolly’s description of snorkelling are designed to elicit a certain state. If more than one story is told, you can pay attention to the sequence of states, which then becomes installed as a sort of strategy. Obviously, a useful strategy leads to a useful result, so you’ll want to design stories which have successful endings or point to successful options. Remember that useful states for learning include relaxation, curiosity and motivation.
3. Sequence the stories in “nested” form. The first story you start is the last to finish and so on. This “packages” the central “place”, where most of your content can be taught. The sequence is:

• Consider how you connect the stories. Good connections are “seam-less” and can often be achieved by chunking up to some general principal and then down into the next story, saying in effect: “So what’s been happening in this story is an example of…. And another example of that is….”
• Anchor useful states. I generally have a set place on the stage from which I tell my main loops, and I use other gestural and tonal anchors to mark out individual stories. Just as Billy Connolly triggers laughter with a certain gesture or word, you can trigger intense curiosity, deep trance, or any other useful learning state. Metaphors are one great way to elicit states initially. Anchors place these states in storage for later use.
• Consider the effects of the state-dependency of learning. Eliciting learning states will assist your students to learn. On the other hand, what they learn will be most accessible when they re-enter those learning states. This presents a dilemma for some NLP training, as discussed below.

If someone goes to a training where they only sleep five hours a day, and spend their day shouting and moving dynamically; then to access what they learn on that seminar later, they may need to be able to sleep less, move dynamically and shout. If someone goes to a training where they spend their day in a somnambulistic (sleep-walking) trance, they may need to be zoned through the floor to recall what they learned. This was no problem for Erickson, by the way: he only intended George to recall his learnings unconsciously. George quite likely had very little conscious access to the changes he made with Erickson. If you are teaching hypnosis, you want people to learn in trance. But if you’re teaching them to do things wide awake and analytically conscious, you want their learning state to match that situation. This means thinking carefully about the states you select to elicit just before you teach any content.

In fact, that’s the whole message of this article. Think carefully about the states you want to elicit before you teach something… and step into them. In 1983 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. It was a great moment in his career; but perhaps not the greatest. Because by then, both of those two students, who had studied with him through that long winter in the 1950s, had also themselves won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Passion is contagious. The same textbook can be a tedious set of equations in one state, or a door to the universe in another. Most of what I remember of mathematics, I learned that year, with the teacher who lived in the mathematical universe.

Richard Bolstad is an NLP trainer. His book, Transforming Communication, was described in Anchor Point magazine as “a treasure trove of training activities in rapport skills, conflict resolution and team building.”

References:

• Bolstad, R. and Hamblett, M. Transforming Communication, Longman, Auckland, 1998
• Bolstad, R., “NLP: The Quantum Leap” in NLP World, Vol. 3, No. 2, July 1996, p 5-34
• Csikszentmihalyi, M., Flow, Harper & Row, New York, 1990
• Dilts, R., Roots of Neuro Linguistic Programming, Meta Publications, Cupertino, California, 1983
• Jensen, E., The Learning Brain, Turning Point, Del Mar, California, 1995
• Lankton, S. and Lankton, C., The Answer Within: A Clinical Framework of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy, Brunner/Mazel, New York, 1983
• Marshall, I., “Consciousness and Bose-Einstein condensates” in New Ideas in Psychology, 7, 1989, p 73-83
• O’Connor, J. and Seymour, J. Training With NLP, HarperCollins, London, 1994
• O’Connor, J. and Seymour, J., Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming, HarperCollins, London, 1990
• Reid, J., Billy and Albert: Billy Connolly at the Royal Albert Hall, Polygram Video, London, 1987