Thoughts on Chunking - NLP Articles

This article comes from thoughts that came to mind whilst assisting on the summer NLP Practitioner course and aim at bringing more connections to the topic of chunking.

Mathematics could be considered the study of rules between numbers. In arithmetic, we learn the rules of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. These rules guide you how to think. So 2 and 3 = 5 the rule is addition. But 2 and 3 = 6 the rule is multiplication. These rules are logic, unequivocal and universal. In communication, how people use rules of logic is often idiosyncratic and unknown to the person they communicate to, as well as themselves.

NLP can be seen as the study of how people organise their own logic and conceptualisation to make their experience and create their map. The lack of discipline in logic is what creates art. The discipline in logic is what makes computers. Chunking itself is connected to, or is a skill used in: Part negotiation, positive intention, how someone construct their map, distortion, complex equivalence, implied cause and effect, constructing metaphors, ecology check, etc In themselves, all of these are examples of different size NLP chunks!

It is usually understood in our culture that a person bringing flowers to their partner or to a person who invited them is seen as a message of love. From their point of view it is a good gesture, with a meaning attached to it; in other words, part of the class of behaviour to display affection.

· Miss Matching Across: If the receiver is in accord with their intention it is fine, but it could be misinterpreted. "If my husband is bringing me flowers it is probably because he wants to be forgiven for something he has done." That could loosely be considered a chunking across, from a sign of love, to a sign of absolution. The meaning of the communication……
· Miss Matching Down: If at the one logical level it is accepted that the gift of flowers is a gift of love, what happens if the logic differs at the lower logical level? A clash of maps. For example the giver offers flowers and the receiver sees white lilies, dandelion, or any other "chunked down version" of flowers which has, for them, another meaning attached to it - ie white lilies = funerals, dandelion= weeds, or chrysanthemums = boring, daffodils = cheap. In that case it is not received as a message of love! In a dispute, the wife could say " you never show me love" and the husband could answer, " I bring you flowers!"

When chunking down, or going in the specific, there are many valid rules, often held outside our awareness:

an example	table è coffee table
a part of	table è leg
a benefit	table è flat surface
a material	table è wood
a desire	tableè quality
a need	table è surface area
a meaning	table è cultural clue

All is fine when people know the rules and stay within it. The inherent logic flows up and down the logical levels, and can be sustained across different logical types.

Problems with others and with oneself occur when the rules are not recognised or adhered to. This may not be deliberate or wilful; it is just another example of how this person creates their reality. When it happens, there is no more logic in the reasoning, which can create a bump of incongruence for the listener.

Teenagers and parents are well used to this source of confusion. The teenager starts of with need and then slips into want. If the rapport is great, the parent may still be applying the logic of need to the statement of want, and find themselves handing over money and wondering what happened.

Faulty reasoning can be obscured by authoritatively describing say the benefits of an object and then chunking up to claim this to be an example of cultural behaviour.

As a listener, we need to spot those moments of incongruence, detect the shift, and call on our meta model questioning skills. In particular the distortion questions help to clarify the thinking and retrieve the missing change of rule - implied cause and effect to find the rule, and complex equivalence to find the meaning.

According to the studies of psychologist George Miller, we can only pay attention to an average of between 5 and 9 bits of information. That means that above this number we are overwhelmed. And we either group things together or become confused even with seemingly easy information.

For example, when we learn to drive, all is new and we are easily overwhelmed. As we get used to it, we group tasks. Changing gear and pressing the clutch pedal and listening to the motor rhythm and the timing of it and the traffic ahead and feeling ok about it become one easy task. When we are used to driving, we can add to the task, i.e. we can listen to the radio, think of the weekend, talk to another passenger, etc. Something, which added to the number of things we had to do when we learnt to drive, would have exceeded our capabilities.

In ancient times, studies have shown that people could not comprehend more than 200 things, whether it was people, trees, horses etc. Big numbers had to be given as metaphors. It would have been like the number of stars in the sky, or the warriors coming to invade us would have been like the number of fingers in all our hands. 1 732 698 is a lot of units. Back then that amount would have been incomprehensible. But because of maths, we can now organise it in millions, hundred of thousands, tenth of thousands, thousands, hundreds, tenths, and units. Therefore only 7 bits of information!

7±2 thinking underpins the effectiveness of writing lists for example - putting say 10 tasks onto 1 list, reduces the number of actions required, namely Consult the List - and then hopefully complete each of the tasks on it! For teachers, this thinking has big implications for teaching. From a teacher's point of view, the information could be one chunk, because it is obvious to them, but for the learner it could be many. It is difficult to remind oneself of this when teaching, because it is so unconscious. Just try to go and model someone who can ride a bicycle or juggle to explain how it works! Fortunately, when modelling, the learner gathers the size and chunks of information he or she can deal with, organises it in bigger chunks and goes and finds smaller chunks as needed.