With apologies to David Bowie, I never really understood what he meant by, “turn and face the strain.” Nevertheless, fall—at least in Michigan—is one of those times of year when change becomes obvious.

If you watch TV at all, you’ve seen the ad: “Head On—Apply directly to the forehead; Head On—Apply directly to the forehead; Head On—Apply directly to the forehead, etc.” Although this particular “story” is not about the Head On ad in particular, it is about the persuasive power of television, and, as the ad for Head On has demonstrated, an ad doesn’t have to say much to gain notoriety.

I’ve never actually seen a mood ring, but from time to time they have had fad status. You can tell a person’s mood by the color of the ring: blue for happy, green for so-so, black for anxious. The rings themselves are basically a liquid crystal display (LCD) calibrated to the average skin temperature of 82 degrees. If your skin temperature is average, the ring shows green. If your skin temperature is higher than average, the ring turns blue: the warmer the ring, the darker the blue; the cooler the ring, the deeper the black. I’m not sure what the rings would do for such moods as anger, guilt, or sadness.

English can be a challenging language. The actual title of Shakespeare's play is, of course, All's Well that Ends Well. It's one of those adjective/adverb things. In a recent commercial for Cheerios, the General Mills inspired actor tells his son that he is worried about his cholesterol test because "Last time I didn't do so good."

In NLP, we normally think of digital and analog with reference to submodalities, the way we create our internal representations--our subjective experience. Digital submodalities are those that are either on or off. An image can be either black and white or color. If the image is black and white, analog shifts would be brightness and shades of gray. If color, analog shifts would be brightness, saturation, and hue.

Submodalities are either indicators or determiners of meaning. We use submodalities to code likes, dislikes, fears, and desires. Create a visual image of a person or a food that you like a lot, and then do the same for a person or a food that you really dislike. You probably noticed a number of differences in the way you represented the like and dislike: the location of the image (high/low, left/right), distance (how far from you the image seemed), amount of color, and so on.

In an important new book, Radical Knowing: Understanding Consciousness through Relationship, Christian de Quincy addresses many of the relationship issues that have been most vexing over the years. In an early relationship, de Quincy discovered that his partner negotiated the world using intuition and spiritual experience, undermining his efforts to understand her using his intellectual tools for dissecting ideas and language. De Quincy is careful to point out that the division is not strictly based on gender, and that both men and women can use either type of knowing.

When Debra and I were in Mexico for training last year, one of the issues Gabe Guerrero discussed was blocks to learning. He mentioned that people had told him that they couldn't learn from someone because he or she was fat. Others had said that they couldn't learn from someone who had long hair or those who dressed in ways they considered "strange." A recent discussion on the NLP list has led me to revisit the idea of creating artificial barriers to learning. One person on the list said that she needed to have information presented in a logical, structured way that fully engaged her conscious mind. She claimed that she was unable to learn from those who used metaphors and did not follow a logical outline. This led me to think about what stops people from learning.

While looking through The Biology of Belief, by Bruce Lipton, Debra and I were reminded of the study of the "fake" knee surgery that demonstrated the still-untapped potential of placebos. The study was originally published in The New England Journal of Medicine, 11 July 2002, and you can find a balanced, comprehensive review (by Bernstein, J., and Quach. T. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine. 70:5, pp. 401-410) at the following URL:

http://www.ccjm.org/pdffiles/Bernstein503.pdf

One of the classic observations about decision-making strategy is that failure to make a decision is a decision. That's not always a bad thing, of course. In some cases, the best decision is actually waiting for more evidence or insight before deciding. In other cases, it's the wrong choice. The real question seems to be whether you recognize that you have reached a choice point and deliberately choose not to choose. Decision-making strategies, like all strategies, are based on the concept of the TOTE (Test, Operate, Test, Exit, courtesy of G. Miller, et al). The first Test lets you know that it is time to begin a strategy. The Operation is a process of evaluating the situation, and the second Test is a check to see whether another Operation is necessary before you Exit the strategy.

The Tests are choice points. If you are driving along and come to a fork in the road, you've reached a choice point. Do you go right or left? In this situation, failure to recognize that you are at a choice point could leave you in dire straits (or even dire straights). I am reminded of an old song by the Lovin' Spoonful, "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind" ... "Say yes to one and let the other one ride...."

I just purchased a new digital video camera, and that has led me to think about what are typically called learning curves. The term implies both a starting point and a progression along a curve, with the curve often being thought of as exponential.

With an exponential learning curve, the first few steps in the process are usually mastered easy, with each gain in knowledge occurring quickly. The farther out on the curve one gets, however, the steeper it becomes, with greater time required for each incremetal gain. Because knowledge in general and knowledge about anything in particular is virtually infinite, knowing everything about virtually anything would take an infinite amount of time.