The Inner World Format

The Inner World Format

We experience the world around us through our five senses of seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting and record the experiences in the brain. These senses are the input channels to access the experiences around. We create an internal representation of what we experience and that creates our inner world. Given below is an overview of the five senses.

V - Visual Sense – to see visuals (picture, scene, image) using eyes

A - Auditory Sense – to hear sounds (tone, noise, voice) using ears

K - Kinesthetic Sense – to feel sensations (temperature, touch) using skin

O - Olfactory Sense – to smell odours/aromas using nostrils

G - Gustatory Sense – to taste flavours/ chemicals using tongue

In NLP we call these sensory input channels as modalities. Our brain uses these modalities to build our internal representation or model of the world around us.  Therefore these sensory modalities are known as Systems of Representation. Our sensory input channels receive information from our ecology or the external world. Then we process thinking using what we see, hear, feel, smell and taste, then filter it and form a representation of what we have seen, heard, felt, smelt and tasted. Our brain uses its micro senses to form its modes of awareness or consciousness. Without these sensory modes we can’t make our internal world.

Though every person uses systems of representation (senses) to perceive the world, they don’t utilize all systems equally. Among the five senses visual, auditory and kinesthetic are most important for a person. If you listen carefully to a person’s language, words and sentences he uses, you understand which system of representation he utilizes more within the three. In NLP with the help of predicates we are able to identify which sensory data a person utilizes to represent his internal experience externally.

Predicates are verbs, adverbs and adjectives a person utilize to express his perceived cognitive information verbally. Say for example a person tells ‘that was a wonderful scene’ which means he has in mind a visual (visual sense) of what he has experienced. Whereas another person with the same experience may express as ‘I was so excited with that experience’. Here the person feels (kinesthetic sense) something. Another person may say ‘that inspiring voice still echoes in my ear drums”. Such a person concentrates on sounds (auditory). There may be non-sensory based predicates also. Say for example ‘it was a wonderful experience!’

The system of representation a person utilizes to perceive information from the world around is known as dominant system of representation. It is not necessary for a person to use the same dominant system of representation to open the mental file of stored experiences from the memory. The system of representation a person utilizes to open the mental file to retrieve information from memory is called lead system of representation. Primary and lead representational systems of a person can be the same sometimes.

Based on the dominant system of representation we name a person the visual, auditory or kinesthetic.  Visual persons understand subjects by making pictures in their mind using their inner eyes. When they read something they make a visual sense of it and store such information as pictures or images. Their dominant sensory organ is their eyes. Auditory persons learn a subject using words, phrases and sounds and they store information back in memory in a similar manner which means their dominant sense is the hearing sense. Kinesthetic persons want to feel the experience to perceive and record it correctly. Their skin dominates eyes and ears.