20 Part I: Introducing NLP
Introducing NLP Presuppositions
NLP presuppositions are no more than generalisations about the world that
can prove useful to you when you act as if they’re true. In the following sec-
tions, we describe some of the presuppositions that we consider to be most
influential out of several that the founders of NLP developed.
The map is not the territory
One of the first presuppositions is that ‘the map is not the territory’. This
statement was published in Science and Sanity in 1933 by Korzybski, a Polish
count and mathematician. Korzybski was referring to the fact that you
experience the world through your senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and
taste) – the territory. You then take this external phenomenon and make an
internal representation (IR) of it within your brain – the map.
This internal map that you create of the external world, shaped by your expe-
riences, is never an exact replica of the map made by someone else perceiv-
ing the same surroundings as you. In other words, what’s outside can never
be the same as what’s inside your brain.
Take the following analogy. If you ask a botanist what Belladonna means,
they may give you the Latin name for the plant and describe the flowers
and slight scent while making a picture of the plant in their head. Whereas
a homoeopath may explain its uses in treating certain symptoms and see a
picture of a patient they treated. If you ask a murder-mystery writer about
Belladonna, they may say that it’s a poison.
Or try another analogy: if you’re driving in London, with your London street
map, the ‘roads’ shown on the map are completely different from the roads
you’re actually driving along. For a start the tube stations you drive past are
in three dimensions and in colour, whereas they are shown as a blue circle
with a red line through it on the map.
The point is that depending on the context and someone’s background, differ-
ent people make different IRs of the same thing.
Putting perceptions through your own personal filter
Your senses bombard you with millions of different bits of information every
second, and yet your conscious mind can deal with only a handful of indi-
vidual pieces at any given moment: as a result, an awful lot of information is
filtered out. This filtration process is influenced by your values and beliefs,
