While Neuro-Linguistic Programming has been condemned (Witkowski, 2010), it has been used to enhance transcript analysis (Tosey & Mathison, 2010) in the area of psychophenomenology, research into first person accounts of experience. It does this by using distinctions in language, the internal sensory representations, and imagery. It draws on the NLP concept that people meld sights, sounds, and feelings before they speak (again, we reiterate the point in this thesis that NLP refers to Neuro-Linguistic Programming and not the commonly referred term Natural Language Programming). With the endorsement of NLP's founder, Dr. Richard Bandler, it has grown into an area called Medical Neuro-Linguistic Programming (Thomson, 2015) with a focus on the use and meaning within language to improve health.
The Preferred Representational System (PRS) has been used in teaching. A study of 283 teachers wanted to know if there was any modality dominance across the Visual and Auditory Representational System modalities (Tardif, Doudin & Meylan, 2015). They highlighted there is a distinction between visual and auditory modalities used by pupils in schools. In another study, testing student’s preferences across the visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic Representational System modalities and helped teachers prepare lectures better (Ancusa, Bogdan & Caus, 2013).
However, Gray (2012) draws on neuroscience to understand the tenets that underpin NLP and suggests it is underpinned by neuroscience, and that our perceptions are reshaped by memory, expectation, cognitive filtering and past experience and broken
by the brain. By drawing on Canonical neuroscience, Gray (2012) shows that NLP can integrate new learnings using NLP in less than 24 hours, and not the usual thirty days it takes to transfer long term memory from the hippocampal stores to permanent cortical networks. He highlights NLP activates a behavioural off-switch in one of the brain’s known circuits consisting of the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex, the anterior and posterior cingulate giri, medial temporal lobe and the precuneus related to related to evaluation, self-control, memory, prediction of future behaviour and empathic understanding of others. If this is true then research into neuroscience and the sensory modalities might open up a new avenue to explore.
Churchland (2002), suggests the self is identifiable with a set of representational capacities of the physical brain, drawing on the 18th-century philosopher David
Hume's description of self to highlight it as a collection of changing visual perceptions, sounds, smells, feelings, emotions, memories, and thoughts, etc. While perception has been viewed as a modular sensory modality function, Shimojo and Shams (2001) and
Yan et al., (2017), suggest they are not separate modalities. They suggest that a unified consciousness, another word for self, is constructed from cross-modal inputs (Winkielman, Ziembowicz & Nowak, 2015).
The U.S. Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science was commissioned in the late 80's to investigate neuroscience techniques (Martin & Pechura, 1991). Of specific interest was functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Many studies have been conducted in to the area of the sensory modalities since, using fMRI, for example; visual and auditory areas (Linden et al., 1999), gustatory and somatosensory perceptions (Cerf-Ducastel et al., 2001), olfactory (Gottfried et al., 2002), visual and kinesthetic (Gulliot, 2009), and more interesting, haptic tactile imagery (Yoo et al., 2003; Deshpande et al., 2008). The term haptic, a bidirectional sensory modality includes an awareness of the outer surface of the body (tactile), and movement, muscle tension and limb position (kinesthetic) (Tan, 2000). This is a wider definition than kinaesthetic that was used in the earlier NLP studies.
What becomes clear is that there are cross-modal binding and integration of each modality (Calvert, Campbell & Brammer, 2000; Shimojo & Shams, 2001; Driver & Noesselt, 2008; Blank, Kiebel & von Kriegstein, 2015; Brunel, Carvalho & Goldstone, 2015). This is an important concept because the results of the earlier sensory study (Kernot, 2013) looked at each word as a single modality, and by considering the cross-
modal aspects, the unified consciousness, or self can be represented through a more refined sensory algorithm that spans several modalities.
2.4.1 Key Cross-Modal Studies
In a study of 523 concrete object nouns by 420 undergraduate students, Amsel, Urbach, and Kutas, (2012) categorized each noun on the five sensory modalities, colour (Visual), sound (Auditory), graspability (Haptic), smell (Olfactory), taste (Gustatory), and on the motor modalities, motion and pain. According to Amsel et al. (2012:1030):
"Each of the five traditional Aristotelian sensory modalities (vision, touch, hearing, smell, and taste) is represented,” (in this study) “in addition to the sensation of pain. We assessed two kinds of visual knowledge, colour, and motion, which are represented in different brain regions proximal to the corresponding sensory cortex."
Each noun object was scored across the seven categories and given a numeric score from 1 to 8. They also provided a value for word familiarity, but no single dominant modality was provided and highlighted the value of concreteness as a key term in assessing sensory words.
In a different study of 423 sensory-based prenominal adjectives by 55 native English speakers, Lynott and Connell (2009), collected words from a range of sources and categorized each object on the five sensory modalities. Lynott and Connell (2009:560) found a 74.8% variance from two factors principal component analysis. Their analysis highlighted significant correlations for the majority of modality pairs, although auditory ratings correlated negatively with all the other clusters and suggested that auditory experience has little to do with other types of perceptual experience. The strongest positive relationship was between olfactory and gustatory modalities, and to a lesser extent, a positive relationship also appeared in the visual-haptic cluster. Only gustatory and haptic ratings showed no appreciable relationship.
What is important from Lynott and Connell's (2009:526) study, is that they concluded most sensory-based words are multimodal rather than unimodal with clustering in the visual-haptic and olfactory-gustatory modalities.
In another study, this one of 400 nouns by 34 native English speakers, Lynott and Connell (2013), obtained nouns from the MRC psycholinguistic database (Coltheart, 1981; Wilson, 1987) to generate a random list. They categorized each noun object on the
word familiarity. What was different from the Amsel et al. (2012) study was that Lynott and Connell provided a dominant modality and exclusivity percentage. Drawing on an earlier study about adjectives, Lynott and Connell (2009) discovered that concepts using nouns are more multimodal across the range of the five sensory modalities than adjectives. This suggested that prenominal adjectives, words that immediately precede the noun, appear in fewer of the five sensory modalities.
While the approach of both studies by Amsel et al. (2012), and Lynott and Connell (2013) use excellent sources of research data to categorize nouns by their modalities, any content analysis of text will be highly reliant on the occurrence of those nouns. Because Lynott and Connell (2013) highlight the benefit of prenominal adjectives over nouns, that there is more of a likelihood to have a more dominant modality, and that because a smaller set of adverbs, particularly prenominal adjectives, will occur more often over a wide range of nouns, sensory-based adverbs would seem a better approach to use for content analysis.
van Dantzig, Cowell, Zeelenberg, and Pecher (2011), drew on the results of the Lynott and Connell (2009) study. They collected modality ratings for a set of 387 properties, each paired with two different contexts to create 774 concept-property items rated through five perceptual modalities. They computed the degree a property is perceived exclusively through one sensory modality and provided modality exclusivity scores for the 387 words to a higher level of fidelity than previous studies.
2.4.2 Summary
In this section, we have discussed the recent developments in the literature in NLP and neuroscience within the context of the sensory modalities studies using NLP predicates. By using the van Dantzig et al. (2011) data, better fidelity sensory scores that reflect a person's use of sensory words should be realised. The concept of self through the multi-modal exchange of sensory information within the brain should also provide a better indication of authorship identification.