The therapist completed the remainder of the workshop without interference, and, in fact, after this reference experience, was able to incorporate the material extremely rapidly. Within a few weeks after this workshop, her work with her clients had improved so dramatically that her client load had tripled as a result of client referrals. So marked was the increase in her client turnover rate that it created somewhat of a furor with the other therapists in her agency who had no idea about what was going on or what had occurred. She eventually left the agency, and has conducted a successful private practice ever since.

V. DESIGN

We all know what "design" means — or at least we pretend we do. In order to achieve a certain outcome that can't be immediately produced or that hasn't been done before, we devise a plan or design a strategy to accomplish that particular outcome — such as starting a new business, inventing a better mousetrap or bringing surface samples back from Mars. Strategy design is most effective when all appropriate sensory channels are used to survey available resources, including all relevant environmental variables and decision variables, and to decide how to utilize them effectively in generating the desired outcome.

Consider, for example, a simple topological problem. The outcome objective is to connect the nine dots below using only four straight lines without lifting your pen or pencil from the paper. Give it a try if you want to — look at it, check your feelings and talk to yourself about it.

If you were successful, congratulations. Very few people are able to complete this design problem successfully because they assume one or more decision variables are in the domain of environmental variables. (See the next page for the solution.)

In our experience we have found that maximum effectiveness in design is achieved by making the fewest possible assumptions about contextual constraints — those features of a particular behavioral environment that only seem to be environmental variables— and by making creative and efficient use of available resources.

The most frequent assumption with this problem is that one's pen or pencil must not be moved away from the pattern of dots, in which case five straight lines are required to connect all dots. A second and less frequent assumption is that pen or pencil lines must not cross. The solution is:

5. Design

Sometimes the organization or individual with whom the programmer is working will have no strategy immediately available; for a particular outcome or, possibly, no strategy at all for securing the desired outcome. Others may have strategies, which, although achieving the outcome, are very cumbersome and inefficient. Still others have developed strategies which achieved an outcome that was important and adaptive in one context in the organization's or individual's personal history, but which have been generalized to contexts in which the outcome is no longer appropriate. In this case, the strategy very often becomes streamlined and efficient but the outcome becomes maladaptive. Since the strategy is so streamlined that it is entirely unconscious, the individual or organization loses some of the requisite capability to discriminate in the test phase and, since everything happens so quickly, there is little room for flexibility. The person or organization becomes ineffectual.

In each of these instances the programmer may be called upon to help design a new strategy for the individual or organization in question. Some cases require a design for more appropriate tests; others – need more effective and efficient operation designs. In cases where there is no existing strategy whatsoever, the programmer will have to design from scratch an entirely new sequence of representations.

5.1 Streamlining

Streamlining is required for strategies that are cumbersome or inefficient in achieving the desired outcome. For example, we have noticed that people who were good at reading aloud when they were children, or who are still good at sight reading, have a difficult time with speed reading. This is because they have developed a strategy that includes an auditory digital step in their processing of the written word; that is, they have a verbal translation phase in their reading strategy. Very fast readers do not have this step — the visual symbols making up the word directly access internal representations without the auditory digital step.

Words, as we have pointed out, are anchors for 4–tuples of experience and only have meaning for us in terms of the experiences they elicit. Persons with an auditory digital step in their reading strategies must say the words to themselves before they will have any meaning (before they access the relevant stored experience). The strategy goes:

The speed reader's strategy goes directly from seeing the written word to accessing the internal 4–tuple:

For most people who subvocalize or verbalize the word internally, the synesthesia pattern becomes so strong that they actually can't understand written language just by looking at it — they must say it to themselves (transform it to auditory digital) before it makes any sense; otherwise it may as well be in a foreign language.

Although the strategy involving the verbalization step is a fine strategy for the outcome of sight reading aloud, (which is generally reinforced in grammar school), it is inefficient for reading quickly. It is possible to see whole sentences and paragraphs at once, but internal verbalizing requires pronouncing words in sequence, one at a time, and the information gathered by such a procedure is redundant since it contains the same digital information already present in the written material. For the outcome of rapid reading the sight reader's strategy would need to be streamlined by pulling out the unnecessary Aⁱ_d step. This will generally involve the rehearsal and development of a synesthesia pattern working directly from V^e_d .

Speed reading courses generally have you rehearse the speed with you gather the visual information, but do not work directly with the strategy. Of the people we've talked to who have taken speed reading courses, those who already have the V^e→

synesthesia pattern as an existing natural resource benefit the most from the training. Readers who have a strong V^e→Aⁱ_d, synesthesia pattern learn to look at the words faster but become very frustrated at their high loss of comprehension, until they've stuck with the process long enough to reprogram the strategy themselves. The effectiveness of speed reading courses is tied to their tendency to force the reader to establish a V^e_d synesthesia pattern, because the reader doesn't have time to say the words internally. For the highly auditory reader, however, this essentially involves relearning the language which can be very difficult. The process is much easier when the individual rehearses the new strategy at the same time he or she is learning the mechanics of speed reading. In the Installation Section of this book we will provide methods you can use to assist with the installation and development of various synesthesia patterns.