If you have any fragment of any experience, you can have it all. Let me ask you to do the following: Roll your shoulders forward and close your eyes and feel as though something or someone is pushing down on your shoulders. And then take those feelings, intensify them, and let them come up into a picture. Who or what do you find there? As you get the picture, I want you to notice some dimension of the picture that is connected with some sound that would be occurring if that were actually happening. And now hear the sound.

That's the principle of overlap. You can always go to the state of consciousness a person indicates by their predicates, and from there you can overlap into any other dimension of experience and train a person to do any of these things.

Richard: I know. I did it myself. Four years ago I couldn't see an image; in fact I didn't know that people did. I thought people were kidding when they did visual guided fantasies. I had no idea that they were actually seeing images. And when I figured out what was going on, I realized that there were these differences between people. Then I began trying to make images. Of course, the way I first tried to make images was by talking to myself and having feelings, which is the way people who have trouble making images usually go about it. They say to themselves "Gee, I should look at this even harder!" and then feel frustrated. Of course, the more I talked to myself and the more I had feelings, the less I could see images. I had to learn to do it by overlap: by taking a feeling or a sound and then adding the visual dimension.

You can use overlap to train a client to be able to do all systems, which I think is a benefit for any human to be able to do. You yourself can notice which of the representational systems you use with refinement and sophistication, and which you have difficulty with. Then you can use overlap as a way of training yourself to be as sophisticated in any system as you are in your most advanced.

Let's say you have good kinesthetics but you can't visualize. You can feel yourself reach out with your hand and feel the bark of some tree. You explore tactually until you have a really good kinesthetic hallucination. You can visualize your hand, and then you look past your hand inside your mind's eye and see what the tree looks like, based on the feelings—as you feel the roughness, the texture, the temperature of the bark. If you visualize easily and you want to develop auditory, you can see the visual image of a car whirling around a corner and then hear the squeal of the tires.

Man: Would a congenitally blind therapist be at a disadvantage?

Visual accessing cues are only one way to get this information. There are other things going on equally as interesting, that would give you the same information and other information as well. For instance, voice tone is higher for visual access and lower for kinesthetic. Tempo speeds up for visual and slows down for kinesthetic. Breathing is higher in the chest for visual and lower in the belly for kinesthetic. There are lots and lots of cues. What we are doing is giving one little piece at a time. Your consciousness is limited to seven—plus or minus two—chunks of information. What we are doing is saying "Look, you normally pay attention to other dimensions of experience. Here's another class of experience we'd like you to attend to, and notice how you can use it in a very powerful way."

I can get the same information by voice tone, or tempo changes, or by watching a person's breathing, or the change in skin color on the back of their hand. Someone who is blind can get the same classes of information in other ways. Eye movement is the easiest way that we've discovered that people can learn to get access to this class of information called "representational system." After they have that, we can easily teach them other dimensions.

You might think that a blind therapist would be at a disadvantage. However, blindness is a matter of degree in all of us. The non-sighted Person who has no chance of seeing has an advantage over most other communicators: he knows he is blind, and has to develop his other senses to compensate. For example, a few weeks ago in a seminar there was a man who is totally blind. A year ago, I had taught him how to be able to detect representational systems through other means. Not only was he able to do it, but he was able to do it every bit as well as every sighted person in that room. Most of the people I meet are handicapped in terms of their sensory ability. There is a tremendous amount of experience that goes right by them because they are operating out of something which to me is much more intense than just "preconceived notions." They are operating out of their own internal world, and trying to find out what matches it.

That's a good formula for being disappointed, by the way. One of the best ways to have lots of disappointment in your life is to construct an image of how you would like things to be, and then try to make everything that way. You will feel disappointed as long as the world doesn't match your picture. That is one of the best ways I know of to keep yourself in a constant state of disappointment, because you are never going to get the world to match your picture.

There is another vast source of process information in observing the motor programs that are accessed when a person thinks about an activity. For example, Ann, would you sit in a "normal" position with your legs uncrossed? Thank you. Now let me ask you a preparatory question. Do you drive a car? (Yes.) Is there a single one you drive typically? (Yes.) OK, now, this is a question I don't want you to answer out loud, but just go ahead and access the answer internally. Is it a stick shift or is it an automatic shift? ... Did anyone else get the answer? Would you like to guess about the answer and check it out?

Man: Stick shift.

OK. How do you know that?

Man: She shifted. I saw her move her right hand.

Can you tell by the shift whether it was a manual or automatic?

Man: It's manual.

Now, is that true, Ann? (No.) No, it's an automatic. Now, did anybody else have that answer?

Woman: Yeah, because I figured she was little and she wouldn't want to drive a stick shift.

OK. Did anybody use sensory experience to get the answer?... Well, let me answer the question directly. If you had been watching Ann's feet, you would have gotten the answer to that question. One of the differences in the motor program between an automatic and a stick shift is whether you have a clutch to work. If you had been watching, you could have seen muscle tension in her right leg and not in her left, which would have given you the answer.

If you ask a person a question that involves a motor program, you can observe the parts of their body they will have to use in order to access the information. Information doesn't come out of a vacuum in human beings. In order for a human being to get information to answer a question, they have got to access some representation of it. And although they may only bring one of those systems into consciousness, they are going to access all systems unconsciously to gather the information.

Ann: We have both kinds of car and I drive both. You said "Which one do you drive usually?" If you had asked me "Do you have a different car?" and then asked me about that specific car, would my motor programs have been different? If I was thinking of driving the other car, would my legs have moved differently?

Yes. You use your left foot only if there is a clutch. Consider how you answer the following question. You all have front doors to the homes or apartments that you live in, whether they are long-term homes or apartments. As you walk into your apartment or home, does the first door open to the right or the left? Now, how do you decide that question? ... All the hands are moving.