A Human Technology

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Speaker 1: Take a deep breath in.

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Speaker 2: And breathe out.

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Speaker 3: Your conscious mind is going to go totally away so that I can speak privately of your unconscious mind.

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Speaker 4: From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. This is episode five of mind Games.

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Speaker 5: I'm Zoe Lascas, I'm Alice Hines.

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Speaker 2: You don't know how you did it?

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Speaker 6: Can do you?

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Speaker 2: You're going to a little time to STARSI stake and you're out of it.

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Speaker 4: In a previous episode, we met Tony Robbins, the six foot seven self help tycoon who built his empire on neurolinguistic programming NLP. We mentioned his work with Bill Clinton, celebrities ranging from Pitbull to Princess Diana, and that he's introduced NLP to millions of everyday people.

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Speaker 5: But there's one client we didn't tell you about. It's probably the biggest organization Tony's ever worked for.

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Speaker 4: We're talking annual budget just shy of two hundred billion dollars. Big.

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Speaker 2: We do more before nine am than most people do all day.

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Speaker 3: Made for a.

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Speaker 4: Sergeant YEP the US Army, and in the nineteen seventies, the Army began searching for new technologies to enhance human performance in nineteen eighty one, members of the Intelligence and Security Command began to investigate how they might operationalize NLP. It may seem weird that the military would look twice at nlpchild of some California lefties, but the Army was, in many ways the ideal self help customer, an organization struggling with insecurity and some serious baggage. Public perception of the military had tanked with the Vietnam War, and officials worried the Soviets were outpacing the US. They were desperate for anything that would give them an edge.

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Speaker 5: Didn't they also look into alien communication technologies in this era?

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Speaker 4: What didn't they look into? They were all over the new ag map. They were doing like long distance viewing, like psychic viewing experiments that continued until the nineties. By the way, anyway, the Army Intelligence and Security Command hired Richard Bandler, John Grinder, and some of their NLP friends to run a whole bunch of experiments. We're going to focus on one. One of the trainers in charge was none other than Tony Robbins. His job was to see if he could improve the standard pistol training for new recruits.

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Speaker 6: And I can take any training you do in the entire army. Cut the training time in half an increase the competency. He said, you're crazy, and I said, no, I'm expensive, and we negotiated this deal.

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Speaker 4: Tony said that only seventy percent of new recruits passed the standard forty five caliber pistol training. He also said it took way too long.

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Speaker 6: So I said, I'll turn that around. I'll cut it in half.

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Speaker 4: According to Tony, that's exactly what he did. One hundred percent of the soldiers in the new NLP pistol training passed. It took half the time, and the participants used half the usual Ammo and the Colonel.

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Speaker 6: Ret a letter of the general saying it's the first breakthrough in pistol shooting since World War One.

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Speaker 4: I traveled down to the suburbs of Washington, d C. To meet the guy who ran the pistol experiment with Tony.

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Speaker 1: Okay, this this is a dirty hairy special. This is the gun he uses in the movie.

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Speaker 4: Wyatt Wouod Small is now in his eighties. He's had a long career as a prominent NLP trainer who's worked with some predition Azi clients, including several medal winning athletes on the US Olympic dive team and major companies like pul Lloyd and Avery Denison. At the time of the pistol experiment, Wyatt was interpreting incoming intelligence. Richard Bandler was one of his NLP teachers, so I figured we could run a little experiment of our own. I wanted to see if NLP could make me a sharpshooter in just three days.

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Speaker 5: This would be using NLP to do something that's very easy to measure objectively, marksmanship. Either you hit the target or you don't.

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Speaker 7: Okay.

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Speaker 1: This is a forty four magnum with an eight and three a tents barrel.

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Speaker 4: Smith and Weston I met Wyatt at his home, where we took a look at his gun collection, which he keeps upstairs in two safes, the size of refrigerators. From the outside, Wyatt's house looks pretty normal, red bricks, white trim, a two car garage, but right inside there is a giant black and gold sculpture of an Egyptian god with the head of a bird. Also many pictures of angels throughout the house, most of which are memorials to his late wife. As we looked at his guns, I found myself a little distracted by the decor. You mentioned that she had had past life experience in ancient Egypt. Did she also what was her connection to angels?

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Speaker 1: She came from the angelic realm.

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Speaker 4: Wyatt handed me a gun and walked me through basic firearm safety, so neither of us ended up in the angelic realm.

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Speaker 8: So put your finger on the trigger, Okay, squeeze slowly.

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Speaker 1: So that gives you an idea of what the trigger pressure.

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Speaker 6: Is going to be.

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Speaker 4: After shooting laser bullets in his kitchen, we graduated to live ammunition and hit the local shooting range. Okay, and could we fraw on another box of nine milimeter? Thanks? And could we do one more red dot target bullets in hand, we donned our goggles and went inside Are Ready. There was a line of booths separated by bulletproof glass, and the floors were littered with brass shells. It was busy, even on a Monday afternoon. It was tough to dial into Whyatt's advice with guns going off constantly and unpredictably.

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Speaker 3: Read dot and the X and.

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Speaker 1: Lean forward slightly okay, the imbalance like you were, and squeeze the tree.

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Speaker 4: Okay. Whyatt kept moving the target back?

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Speaker 1: Okay, right in the middle.

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Speaker 4: Right in the middle, perfect, not bad for my first time out with a pistol coll of a teacher. Why we celebrated with lunch at Red Lobster. I was feeling pretty hyped about my progress, but I was beginning to wonder. Okay, so my big question is, how is this NLP versus just teaching someone how to shoot a gun?

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Speaker 5: You read my mind?

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Speaker 4: I pressed Wyat to explain what he was doing with me and how it came out of his work with the Army.

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Speaker 3: Why.

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Speaker 4: It says he developed these methods by modeling expert marksmen champion shooters from the Army Marksmanship Unit. The premise is that people who are really good at what they do usually can't explain what exactly makes them exceptional. Modeling involves observing and interviewing experts until you decode what they're doing physically and mentally. That gives them an edge.

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Speaker 1: And we noticed that their eyes would flick up into visual remembered.

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Speaker 4: Visual remembered in NLP terms, that means the expert's eyes flicked up and to the left before they took a shot.

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Speaker 9: If you're constructing pictures. Your eyes would go up here, he glanced up. If you're feeling sensations and feelings, your eyes would go down here.

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Speaker 4: He looked down and to his left.

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Speaker 1: If you're talking to yourself, your eyes would go down here.

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Speaker 5: NLP is really big on eye movements. You're gonna hear more about them later in this episode.

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Speaker 4: Wyatt noticed that right before each marksman pulled the trigger, he pictured perfect side alignment, the small bits of iron at the end of the barrel framing the bullseye. So why didn't Tony created a kind of mantra routine for the trainees.

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Speaker 8: Side alignment, side align with side alignment trigger squeeze trigger shige, trigger squeeze, bang recover, side aligne on sideline on side alignment, trigger squeeze, trigger, squeeze, bang recover.

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Speaker 4: Whyatt taught me this mantra and it did seem to help? What Day three of the Great Shooting Experiment. How are you feeling about how it's gone so far?

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Speaker 1: I think it's going superbly well. I am surprised at how well you're doing.

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Speaker 5: Okay, so Zoe's a sharpshooter now.

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Speaker 4: Alice, No one is more surprised than this reporter, but yeah, kind of. By day three, I was consistently hitting bullseyes at twenty five yards, which is far. It's like the length of a tennis court. It's also one of the standard distances the Army uses in their pistol training courses. So if I did it with accuracy, I would qualify as an expert.

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Speaker 5: So the funny thing about this whole experiment is that, Okay, yes, on the surface, it's like wow, NLP worked, but also like low, Ki's always really good at everything.

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Speaker 4: Excuse me, look at who is talking google her? Uh sure, except not blushing apparently Alice.

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Speaker 5: Okay, So, but here's the thing. This proves absolutely nothing about NLP.

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Speaker 4: No, it doesn't. We have no idea if I would have done any better or worse with another type of training. And we're not the only ones who struggled to find hard evidence for whether NLP works. In nineteen eighty four, the Army Research Institute asked the National Academy of Sciences to review the various human enhancement technologies it had been pursuing, and a group of researchers in cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and a bunch of other related fields took a hard look at NLP.

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Speaker 5: And they were pretty damning. Here's what the National Academy of Sciences said about that marksmanship experiment. The design of the study was experimentally flawed and no valid conclusions can be drawn from it.

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Speaker 4: Basically, the NAS said the Army's pistol experiment was too informal to matter. NLP trainers boasted about the apparent improvement over the standard training, but it was impossible to compare them.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, because the two trainings took place in completely different locations. Real experiments are supposed to eliminate variables like this. In this one, there were a million factors that could have affected shooter performance, like how hot the room was, how much sleep the recruits had, etc.

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Speaker 1: Etc.

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Speaker 4: So the Army never implemented the new NLP pistol training methods, and it discontinued its other NLP programs too.

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Speaker 5: The NAS report probably didn't help this, quotes the Kicker for me. Overall, there is little or no empirical evidence to date to support either NLP assumptions or NLP effectiveness so harsh.

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Speaker 4: This is partly why people began to see NLP as a pseudoscience. But to be fair. The NAS researchers were only looking at a few aspects of NLP that seemed important at the time. They reviewed twenty papers mostly focused on whether you can persuade people using NLP, specifically by clocking their eye movements.

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Speaker 5: That's this idea in NLP that your eye movements provide a cheat code to your thoughts.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, so the NAS said that just doesn't work. There's zero correlation between visualizing something and glancing upwards, for instance.

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Speaker 5: But eye movements didn't go away. In fact, they inspired one of the most prevalent trauma therapies on the market today, EMDR. I dug into the secret backstory of EMDR and realized something like NLP is still being used by veterans, albeit under a different name.

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Speaker 7: You are looking at a radical new form of psychotherapy. The key is the patient's eyes shifting back and forth in a process that mysteriously unlocked the trauma of times past trauma like war.

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Speaker 5: This is a twenty twenty investigation from nineteen ninety four into I movement desensitization therapy, better known as EMDR.

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Speaker 7: It's being practiced by some seven thousand therapists across the country, and the numbers are growing. It's a combination of traditional talk therapy with something that sounds bizarre.

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Speaker 5: Here's how EMDR works. A therapist moves their fingers or an object in front of the patient's eyes. The patient follows those movements while thinking of an upsetting or traumatic memory. By twenty twenty four, over seven million people had been successfully treated by more than one hundred thousand therapists, according to the EMDR Association, the military is one of the biggest proponents of EMDR. It's one of only three quote evidence based treatments for PTSD endorsed by the Veterans Affairs Health Administration. Here's an official video from the Veterans Administration PTSD portal.

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Speaker 10: If the belief you hold that's attached to your trauma is that I'm worthless, and that's been true for however long you've been surviving this trauma, as we move through the treatment, that belief is going to stop feeling so true, and we're going to bring it in a positive belief.

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Speaker 5: EMDR was invented in nineteen eighty seven by Francine Shapiro, a PhD student in psychology. Here's how she describes her eureka moment. She was on a walk one day in the park. She was thinking about something disturbing and she noticed her eyes moving in a certain way. Then the thought no longer upset her. Here's Shapiro on twenty twenty.

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Speaker 7: If I had seen you that day in the park, what would I have noticed about your eyes?

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Speaker 2: That they were moving very rapidly in a diagonal, just flickering up and down, very very rapidly. So I thought I stumbled upon some mind process that worked with thoughts, And that's what was so fascinating, because I hadn't been doing it deliberately, but I noticed it happening.

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Speaker 4: So she's saying she noticed her own eyes moving when she was thinking about something disturbing, and eye movements are connected to thought.

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Speaker 5: Sounds familiar, and turns out it's not a coincidence. Shapiro was an NLP trainer, not something she often promoted about herself. Her whole story about inventing EMDR at the park struck some people as a little fishy. I've read that eye movements are hard to notice yourself. They're really small and subtle. So what seems likely is that Shapiro was inspired by NLP and primed to notice eye movements.

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Speaker 4: One of the findings of the neuro linguistic programming research.

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Speaker 5: Here's Zoe reading an article Shapiro wrote in nineteen eighty five, two years before she created EMDR.

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Speaker 4: Is that all people cross culturally with the exception of the Bosque nationality, show how they are thinking by the way their eyes move. Using neuro linguistic programming, people are shown how to tap into their personal power, change their state of mind and psychology at will, and access a state of total confidence whenever they encounter a situation that they would otherwise find frightening or upsetting.

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Speaker 5: Gerald Rosen is a psychologist and clinical professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. He's written about EMDR's secret origins.

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Speaker 3: Their theory was pseudoscientific, and bizarrely in their theory was that their statements about these eye patterns didn't apply to the Bosque people. What kind of crazy thing is this?

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Speaker 5: You mean, like people from the Basque country in space?

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Speaker 2: Right?

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Speaker 3: Yes, to give you the overview. EMDR is a novel technique that focuses on eye movements. The foundation of it was discovered by Shapiro when she was going for a walk in nineteen eighty seven. By good chance, she needed a dissertation, and it's a great thing for the clinical world. That's a positive overview. The other overview is that Shapiro was a manipulative marketer who took off from NLP and developed her method.

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Speaker 5: Gerald is uniquely sensitive to snake oil. As a young clinical psychologist, he researched phobia cures and published in peer reviewed journals. Then he wrote a self help book summarizing his research for the general public, and his publisher exaggerated the results on the book jacket to sell more copies. Gerald's been on a mission to expose gurus who overpromise ever since.

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Speaker 3: The paradigm in psychology is that gurus are developing their treatments frequently, if not always. It involves elements that are known to be effective ingredients to intervene and help people. They package it in a way. They have a name, and then they have their acronym, and then they give workshops and then you can get certified in it. And it's just the model that's based on gurus. It attracts charismatic people. We sell the public on this idea that they got to be buying these products to get happy. No one's talking to the insensibly about just the difficult state of the human situation and how we're coping with all these things. Here are some good tools we know about.

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Speaker 4: Okay, So it does seem like Shapiro may have been interested in eye movements because of NLP. But nlpiers generally don't direct eye movements, they observe them. It's the way of reading people's thoughts.

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Speaker 5: Yes, so at the time Shapiro developed EMDR, there was nothing in the NLP literature on using eye movements to treat trauma. It was mostly a diagnostic So this could have been a real innovation by Shapiro even if she wore influenced by NLP, although NLP co founder John Grinder did claim to have invented EMDR after it got.

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Speaker 4: Big another day, another NLP turf.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, so Grinder says Shapiro stole EMDR from him, and he wasn't happy that Shapiro, his former office assistant, went and copyrighted it. So juicy Grinder's account doesn't line up with Shapiro's story. Of course, she claims she discovered EMDR during a walk in the park, and Shapiro died in twenty nineteen, so we couldn't ask her about all of these claims, but we did reach out to the EMDR Foundation for comment and they didn't get back to us.

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Speaker 2: Oo.

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Speaker 4: Let's back up, though, everything I've read indicates the NLP theories of eye movements are bogus, but they are apparently helpful in EMDR.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, it depends on who you ask. Gerald says, you don't need the eye movements for EMDR to work. So in the case of EMDR, the element that you think is effective is the exposure therapy portion of it. Right, like, that seems like it could be helping people with trauma.

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Speaker 3: Wonderful structure. I give her credit, except for the fact that other people were reporting this structure at the.

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Speaker 5: Same time when EMDR came out. Exposure therapy, which is revisiting a traumatic memory repeatedly in detail with a therapist, was already a treatment. And so for this reason, Gerald calls AMDR a purple hat therapy.

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Speaker 4: Sorry, purple hot therapy. The therapist is wearing a purple hat. Fabulous.

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Speaker 5: He is a kind of It's a metaphor. Basically, a purple hot therapy is what happens when you repackage an existing treatment that works with some flashy new element that does nothing.

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Speaker 3: The basic idea is that the treatment works because of known ingredients, and you add this inerd element as a way to promote or market or claim that you have a new and novel treatment.

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Speaker 5: So it's basically a placebo effect.

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Speaker 3: Well, no, a placebo effect is where you're taking something that has no known active ingredient other than the very general specific impact of suggestion and telling someone it's a treatment. And here you really have a treatment effect. So if I have someone with a phobia and I tell them how they should practice driving to get over their fear, that isn't placebo. That's the real use of guided exposure to overcome an anxiety problem.

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Speaker 5: Which is a part of cognitive behavioral therapy, which has evidence behind it.

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Speaker 3: Right absolutely, So it's adding nonsense to an active ingredient. And people could do that truly believing in what they're doing, or you could have people who know it's a purple hat. But this is a way to start a new company.

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Speaker 5: According to Gerald, the purple hot in EMDR is the eye Movements, which Shapiro mare marketed and copyrighted, selling workshops to therapists that today go for several thousand dollars ahead, Zoe, I should disclose that Gerald is in the minority as a skeptic today. Why I movements work hasn't been proven, but the majority of researchers think they actually are an active ingredient in EMDR treatment, So not a purple hat.

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Speaker 4: So what should we make of this alice? I mean, how is it possible that NLP is so scientifically maligned while EMDR has not only stood up to scrutiny but got in all this mainstream credibility it's endorsed by the World Health Organization, when in fact they share some common elements.

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Speaker 5: So one reason could be that EMDR was a lot more savvy in presenting itself to researchers. EMDR's creator, Francine Shapiro, took great care in her method to whittle it down to a specific, testable theory, and then over a few decades researchers did this slow, boring but important work of actually testing what about eye movements helps or doesn't, and they're still testing it.

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Speaker 4: Meanwhile, Richard Bandler pulled techniques from a bunch of sources, called them NLP and made wild claims about what they could achieve like hearing schizophrenics or phobias in ten minutes.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, And Bandler didn't stop there. He marketed NLP pretty and scrupulously as a sexy new persuasion technology to men in suits. He was trying to get rich and it worked. Real psychologists noticed.

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Speaker 4: And when those researchers from the National Academy of Science were trying to study NLP, Richard Bandler basically made it impossible. They met with him in July nineteen eighty six. They'd done their homework, they read all of his books to date, but when they interviewed him about things like eye movements that seemed like a really big deal, Bandler was just like, oh yeah, those forget about him. Weird and the scientists were equally flaw mixed. Bandler told them NLP's continuously changing. He wasn't interested in building up a solid, unchanging theory over time. You can just discard elements whenever you get sick of them.

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Speaker 5: So if NLP is just a process that can involve literally any technique at any time, it's impossible to test or hold to any scientific standard exactly.

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Speaker 4: There aren't any fixed elements or principles. So when people try to apply these rigorous scientific standards to NLP bandlers like jokes on you nerds. You can fight amongst yourself about whether this is scientific or not. I never said it was.

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Speaker 5: The NAS Report discredited NLP to a lot of important people. It was basically the nail in the coffin for NLP gaining mainstream respect. People have been calling it a pseudoscience ever since.

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Speaker 4: But it was not the only thing that made people wary of NLP. The NAS Report came out in January nineteen eighty eight.

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Speaker 5: Oh my god, January nighteth eighty eight.

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Speaker 4: Literally is Bandler's entire life and business is crumbling.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, his entire future was hanging in the balance at this exact moment. What did you see when you first saw the case against Richard Bandler?

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Speaker 3: At face value, it was the overwhelming evidence of guilt. You know, it doesn't look good. You got two guys in a room with a woman, and you know the woman instead, and each of the two guys are pointing at each other.

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Speaker 5: Richard Bandler stands trial for murder next time on mind Games. Mind Games is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series is created and hosted by me Alice Hines and Zoe Lascause. It's produced by writer Alsop and Dara Lukpotts, edited by Kate Osborne. Editorial consulting from Adeza Egan, Original composition and mixing by Steve Bone.

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Speaker 4: Fact checking by Aman Whylan from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswaloshan, Mangeshatikador and Kate Osborne from iHeart, Our executive producers are Katrina Norble and Nikki Etor. Special thanks to white Wood Small for the shooting lessons and to Chris and Holly Darling for hosting our team