Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.
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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
I don't do my credibility any favors by citing hypnosis, it's true. but for better or for worse I am a believer. Hypnosis is not a panacea, but it's useful tool that has been part of my life since early childhood.
In the hypnosis literature there is a phenomenon called "Automatic Motion." As with many hypnotic phenomena this is something you can see from time to time on psychiatric wards, someone making a constant repeated motion. In the context of hypnosis there are at least two views of this phenomenon. The traditional view is that this is a phenomenon that can be elicited and is indicative of a certain level or depth of trance. The non-traditional, Ericksonian view (but don't let that phrasing trick you into the wrong conclusion that the Ericksonians are free from their own dogma and traditions) is that this phenomenon, like almost any other response can be indicative of trance but can also be used to induce, deepen, or simulate trance, depending on the skill of the hypnotist and the peculiar mental goings on of the client.
When I first worked through my very first exercise in "Awareness Through Movement" I thought, "Cool, 'Automatic Motion' applied in an officially non-hypnotic setting."
An axiom of the Bandler/Grinder view of hypnosis, one that I rather un-critically accepted based on its tight fit with my own experience, is that any alteration of one's state of mind can be utilized for "re-programming". My later reading of Erickson's works bolstered this general notion (nearly all Grinder and Bandler's best stuff comes either from Erickson, Bateson, or Hall.)
When the time came for me to remove myself from the N-LP fold (as much for esthetics of association as for any points of doctrine) I cast about for some metaphors of my own to describe some of the overlap between what I would file under Semantic Restructuring and the offical body of N-LP, and one of the things that came to mind was this vague notion that over hypnotic automatic motion, Feldenkrais "Awareness Through Movement", mantra work, mandala work, and Semantic Satiation are all of a piece, all related in that, through repitition, they create a violation of extant associational rule, allowing for new associational paths to take route.
Of course, having shot my mouth off in cogling I now need to spend at least a little time actually reading some of the Semantic Satiation reports I have found. But I doubt they will be entirely relevant to my thrust.
Part of my assumption is that the extant associational rules are basically arbitrary to begin with, even those of language, which are forced on us willy-nilly by the organisms who were here before us, but which nonetheless are entirely arbitrary. My favorite example is probably still run with its scores of "meanings." If ever there were an argument for the general arbitrariness of the relations between the sound clusters we call words and the varied sensory experiences those sound clusters can represent "run" runs at the head of the pack.
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An inquiry to cogling has, as always, borne fruit. What I call semantic overload is called, more technically, Semantic Satiation. It's a pretty well explored phenomenon, no surprise. The link is to a Google Answers page, and does a great job of summarizing.
So the next task for me is to add a little support for the notion that this relates to Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (R) technique, and mantra work.
The obvious connection is in repitition. But I'll be hanged if I can explicate it the way I'd like, except to say as a model these methods are related by the way repitition violates pattern expectations, creating the structure hunger that is the back-bone of Erickson's Confusion Technique. But that's poorly said. Expect more on this before long; it bothers me.
Structure Hunger, for the record, may be a sanctioned Transactional Analysis term, but I first ran into it in the ever delightful, "The Amateur Magician's Handbook":
Shut a man up in a blank cell and he'll hunt for designs in the cracked plaster. Some psychologists call bordom "structure hunger."
And will anyone ever convince me this is not the nature of all meaning?
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It's nice to know I'm not the only person with a passing interest in MUD/MOO. There's also danah boyd (and mind your orthography with this one), a phd candidate researching Articulated Social Networks up in the promised land. danah says:
Sometimes, i wonder if they are studying each other engage in what MUDs and MOOs are supposed to be about.
Seems every time I get an excess of free time and decent bandwidth I dip again into the MUD/MOO world, only to be disappointed. The role-playing muds might be fun with my old gang, but what a time sink. The acedemic muds seemed fascinating, but somehow never really inviting. Thanks to danah's note I'll feel better about diverting what might have been one more wasted trip to mud/moo-land into more productive pursuits...such as beating my head against the monolithic info-glut that is blogspace. B^)
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It seems only fair that someone preaching medium-to-message relationships should spend a little time on the presentation of his material. So I'm trying to spruce up the site. Hope you like.
But I have to go on record as saying that I'm not thrilled with CSS implementation at present. It's a nightmare thinking about all the different ways different browswers fail to comply to the standard and therefor interpret the style markups differently. The folk wisdom seems to be, "Don't worry about it working in all browsers; aim to have it fail gracefully when it fails," officially called "graceful degradation." I can't say that's a criterion that excites me.
But what are the options? PDF? Not hardly; you'll lose most folks because of the load time. Unformatted html? Not unless you're serving the most conservative, information hungry of technoweenies or academicians. Flash? Sucks as much today as ever (and rocks as much as ever, depends on what you want.) Flash is as anti-informavore as ever. Funny how Neilsen warns us he's pointing to a pdf at the bottom of that link.
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