RichardHarlos.com

Imagine: you’re in a classroom and get called upon by the teacher to answer a question. Between the time that the teacher finishes asking the question and the time you begin to answer, I wonder: where do your eyes go while you’re thinking about what to say?

In early September 2006, the British Journal of Developmental Psychology published results from a study that confirmed how important this question really is:

Teachers take note: Students who seem to be ignoring you [by looking away from you when you ask them a question] could actually be processing complex information in an attempt to come up with an answer.

Researchers recently discovered that when school children avert their gaze away from a teacher or other person’s face, they are much more likely to come up with the correct answer.
-from Looking Away Helps Concentration, LiveScience.com, 12 Sep 2006.

I’m not really surprised by this finding, though I suspect a lot of other people may be. Why doesn’t it surprise me? Because I’m familiar with the significance of eye-accessing cues through my study of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP offers a simple yet elegant glimpse into how a person processes, stores and retrieves information by the way a person’s eyes move when asked a question.

What did surprise me, though, was that the British study had the children look down at the floor, at a blank piece of paper, before answering. Children who looked down at the paper on the floor answered more questions correctly than those who were not instructed to look away: 72% vs. 55%. Not bad, eh?

What’s more, on the most difficult questions in the test, the percentage of correct answers between those taught to look away vs. those not so instructed grew farther apart: 60.9% vs. 36.7%.

Why does this surprise me if I already know of the significance of NLP’s eye-accessing cues?

If you visit the eye-accessing cues link, above, you’ll get a very simple introduction into what each eye-direction tells about a person’s learning strategy. Some of us are more visually oriented, others prefer auditory information. Less common are those people who refer to kinesthetics (how they feel in their body) and auditory-digital (internal-dialogue). Least common of all are people who prefer olfactory (smells) and gustatory (tastes) senses as a way of learning and recalling information.

So the British study surprised me in that it instructed the kids to look in a direction that’s normally associated with kinesthetically- and digitally-oriented information processing. As I just mentioned above, these are not typically regarded as the most common means of information processing, storage and retrieval so… imagine how many more kids would have excelled, and by how much more of a margin, than the current study found?

I’m thinking quite a bit more on both counts!

What concerns me is this: despite the knowledge of eye-accessing cues as understood by the NLP community, it seems that this information would be very useful in the academic realm and yet, to this day, it’s still the subject of experimentation vs. actually being taught as part of the certification process for teachers.

Why, with all the advances we’ve made in our understanding of human behavior, do we still rely on ancient and, frankly, less-than-optimally-effective strategies for teaching our children?

One of my favorite sites for NLP information is The International Society of Neuro-Semantics (NS). NS builds upon NLP with additional distinctions and refinements of many NLP theories, as well as adding some new techniques that it has discovered and developed. There are articles on this site that offer beginners as well as advanced practitioners some very useful insights and techniques for learning how to “run your own brain” in ways that, frankly, will astound many of you!

The image at the beginning of this post was gratefully borrowed from the NLP eye movement patterns section of the NLP Instant Rapport Course over at NLP-London.co.uk.

I became a Certified Meta-NLP Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming back in June 2003 and I’ve found the skills that I learned in that training to be so, SO useful to me in every area of my life, and I’m looking forward to more trainings in the near future.