The Map Is Not The Territory

In neuro-linguistic programming, “neuro” refers to the neural pathways in our brain that send, receive, and store the chemical signals that make up the information that is in our heads.

The “linguistic” part is the actual content of that information that moves along those neural pathways. Even though the word “linguistic” refers to verbal information, non-verbal information is also included here.

And the programming is the ways in which these chemical signals are manipulated to become information that makes sense to us and that we can use.

One common way that the brain might accomplish this would be connecting it to the memory of a prior experience already stored in our brain that seems to be similar.

We build up habits of thought and behavior by quickly linking new events to old ones in our head that appear similar. We then react in the same fashion as we did to the experience stored in our memory.

Unfortunately, that reaction may or may not be appropriate for this new experience, but we have trouble dissociating the link between that stimulus and our automatic reaction.

NLP follows the declarations of Alfred Korzybski and Gregory Bateson that there is no such thing as objective experience. That is, there is no single “out there” reality that we are all swimming in (or if there is, we still each live in our own version of it).

Rather, each individual lives with a set of beliefs and perceptions about reality that they have built up, often unconsciously, over a long period of time.

The phrase “the map is not the territory” was originally coined and made famous by Alfred Korzybski, and warns against the common tendency of people to confuse a representation, abstraction, or reaction to a thing with the thing itself.

For instance, it would be like going into a restaurant and chewing on the menu after looking at the pretty pictures of food printed there. Or more realistically, confusing your emotional negative reaction to a certain person with the actual person.

Learning to consciously distinguish between the actual and the representational helps open up one’s understanding.

In NLP, distinguishing the map from the territory is an important guiding principle. As individuals, we do not really have direct access to some kind of objective reality.

Instead, we perceive everything through a heavy filter made up of our beliefs, built up over a long period of time.