Shawn Carson

This is a book of pseudoscience. This becomes obvious from the beginning. After the first few chapters, I gave up on the book because of its promotion of unscientific practices and its misuse of science to support the book’s premises and practices. Let me provide some examples of the poor thinking the authors demonstrate.

The authors state, early in their Forward to the book, that they ‘… are not neuroscientists. Not even close.’ At least they are honest about this, and it shows when you start reading.

Then there’s this: ‘When we describe a process, such as the “Visual Squash,” as a possible method to stimulate hemispheric balance, please understand that we are theorizing.’ What they mean is they are guessing. It then becomes obvious where they are coming from when they go on to say, ‘… there has not been a lot of research on the neuroscience involved in NLP or hypnosis. We hope this will change, but we are not holding our breath. Instead, we are stimulating our brains with all the cool implications that the current thinking in neuroscience means for our work and us.’ This is an admission that they are coming from a particular perspective (NLP and hypnosis) and reading into the neuroscience what they want to see by taking neuroscience concepts as metaphors that suit them in their justification of NLP and hypnosis practice. In fact, there has been very little research on the claims of NLP. These authors seem to think that, if something sounds like what they think, it supports what they think.

A little later in the book, in a chapter on neuroplasticity, they state: ‘Some of these techniques that will be covered in this book are: • Bilateral stimulation • Meridian tapping • Peripheral vision • Backward spin • Heart-coherence breathing Teaching techniques such as these to your clients will allow them to truly discover self-directed neuroplasticity for themselves.’ These all sound scientific but, from what I can find, none of them are backed up with scientific investigation. There are references to scientific studies, but when read carefully, they are usually not studies of the techniques under discussion but rather the authors taking studies that seem related to various concepts in NLP and applying them analogously or metaphorically. There is no reference list or bibliography in the book. And the authors seem to assume that readers are going to be those who already practice NLP, hypnosis, coaching, or other therapies based on some form of NLP. In other words, they are preaching to the converted.

This book seems to be mostly taking NLP practices and overlaying neuroscience in metaphorical ways to make it all sound legitimate. The language and approach of the book are typical NLP, using jargon, flowery language, and positive statements which, when scrutinised, don’t say a whole lot.

A reminder: I stopped reading after the first few chapters. I couldn’t bear to read any more because of what I found in these first few chapters. If you are going to read it, read it critically and carefully. Please understand, I’m not saying there is nothing useful in the book — there may well be. But from my perspective, it is a whole lot of pseudoscience which makes it hard to pick fact from fiction.… (más)