[Neurons] 2024 Neurons #36 THE ART OF THE DEEP DIVE

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2024 Neurons #36

August 26, 2024 

 

THE ART OF THE DEEP DIVE

 

After releasing the first book on The Deep Dive, several people asked me
about this frame in NLP and Neuro-Semantics.  "Where did you get the idea?"
"What does it mean?"   "How do you do it?" The deep dive is an indepth
exploration into a person's mind-to discover what is there and how the mind
works.  

 

For that, however, we need a functional and workable model of the mind.
When we have that, we can then begin to track the mind as it operates.
Without an operational model, we cannot do that.  But with it, we can and
when we do, we can figure out how a person's mind creates his experiences.
And that creates a doorway so we can model her expertise.  We can know how
an experience works as we gain an insider's view.  Then we will know about
what we can do to enhance and improve the quality of that person's life.

 

Now in this, we are not talking about focusing on the brain, our focus here
is on the mind.  That's why the neuro-sciences, for the most part, have
actually very little to say about the mind.  It's only relevant to the
extent that the physical hardware of the brain and its functioning
influences mental capacity.  And that mainly occurs when there's
neurological problems.  If neurology is basically normal, and there's no
neurological damage, then functioning of the mind will have almost no need
for neurological information.  At that point, you don't need information
about the brain, instead you need information about how the mind works.

 

If a person has problems, they will be problems of how the mind is
functioning-and that takes us to how a person has learned, how he uses his
mind, how she has learned to think, and to what cognitive distortions,
biases, and fallacies may be interfering with the person's best mental
functioning.  For example, very seldom does ADD or ADHD have a neurological
base; it is most often the result of failing to learn to focus by caring
about the subject and being intentional.

 

Now apart from neurological damage, the quality of the mind's functioning
depends on the quality of one's thinking.  It depends on one's ability for
critical thinking and creative thinking.  It depends on the person's ability
to think about this thinking (meta-thinking) which in turn, enables him to
correct thinking errors in real time.

                                                                        

Previous Attempts at Going Deep

There actually have been many attempts to get beyond the surface level of
experience and to plummet the depths of human consciousness and experiences.

 

Freud used archeology as his mental picture of depth.  He viewed the deep as
"deep in the past," burred in the unconscious.  Then from that
unconsciousness thoughts and beliefs leak out in the form of verbal slips,
dreams, symptoms.  His metaphor was that of an iceberg, with only a small
percentage seen on the surface.  Most are hidden underneath the water and
out-of-sight.  His solution was to do psycho-archeology.  His assumption was
that "the cause" was in the past.

 

John Watson had a different mental picture of depth in Behaviorism.  He
viewed it as "a black box," one that you cannot penetrate.  And because it
is dark and inaccessible, he focused only on what could be seen, heard, or
felt- the Stimuli that triggers responses, and the Responses that result,
hence the S-R Model.

 

In Cognitive Psychology what is deep is "the deep structure" which Noam
Chomsky said is accessed via the surface structure.  To access it, you can
infer the deep structure through Trnasformational Rules.  Then as George
Miller and others revisited the Black Box, they inferred that it was a TOTE
process, and because of that, we could infer much about the internal testing
and operating on one's internal mapping.

 

Later the NLP's founders took the Black Box and TOTE process even further.
What is "deep" in NLP is hidden in plain sight. It is hidden in the
representational systems and sub-modalities.  There, what is unconscious for
many people, can easily be brought into consciousness.  They filled in the
TOTE model with the representations systems to create the Strategy Model
thereby making the TOTE more explicit.  From Erickson they lkearned how to
recognize and use hypnotic language patterns to access the unconscious.

 

In Neuro-Semantics, deep is in the thinking-conscious or unconsciously,
which occurs in the "back of the mind" and in the higher, but hidden
meta-levels which govern the framework of consciousness.  What is deep is
what is not immediately present or available.  Yet it is deep inside as a
person's frame of reference.  Haivng dropped out of awareness, it operates
as a "way of thinking, feeling, speaking and acting" as a program for how to
function.

 

It is hidden out-of-mind and therefore "deep" simply because it is an old
program (or habit) that we learned.  To some extent it worked in its
original context-at least to some extent.  But things have changed.  We have
grown up.  The original habits no longer work, or only partially.  Now what
we need is to update the old habits/ programs.

 

Now you know why we do the deep dive exploration in Neuro-Semantics.  We do
so to find old habits (neuro-linguistic programs) and update them.  We do so
to identify the structures by which people create their experiences and in
order to give them more choice.  We do so to empower people to unleash their
hidden potentials.  

 




 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

 

 



 

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