Language affects ‘half of vision’

~ FmH
“University of California researchers tested the hypothesis that language plays a role in perception by carrying out a series of colour tests.

They found that people were able to identify colours faster in their right visual field than in their left.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study said it was because the right field is processed in the brain area responsible for language.” (BBC)

This is construed as an empirical test of the controversial and, in its strongest form, discredited Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that the structure and lexicon of a peroson’s native language shapes the perception and understanding of the world. It is more reasonable that linguistic underpinnings make certain concepts or percepts more or less easily grasped. And divergent worldviews and models occur far more readily from influences other than linguistic differences, between people reared with nominally the same native tongue.

It strikes me that this research has some bearing on the ‘fringy’ psychological technic called neurolinguistic programming (Wikipedia ) proposed in the ’70’s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, which attempts to match communication to the perceptual style, cerebral dominance characteristics, etc. of listeners for maximum receptivity. Although it was heavily colored by New Age pap about ‘unlimited potential’ and the like and billed as a set of strategies for ‘therapeutic magic’. Eventually deprecated as a serious psychotherapeutic tool, it has continued to intrigue (and draw customers) in fields like business management, sales, coaching and seduction (!). NLP claims have been roundly criticized for being unsupported by empirical evidence, yet apart from the pop-science trappings and the reductionist popularization, I have always suspected that Bandler and Grinder had touched on more than a grain of truth.

Funny, what the Wikipedia article does not touch upon is the debt that NLP owed to ‘Ericksonian hypnosis,’ a far more psychologically credible but obscure set of therapeutic techniques developed by psychologist Milton Erickson (1901-80). He operationalized the belief, which I share, that the psychotherapy session is a sort of entry into a joint trance state. Usually, the therapist is not aware of that aspect of the psychotherapy encounter, but Erickson said it could be recognized and explicitly, although subliminally, used in therapeutically powerful ways.