Representational systems are our internal senses. We “re-present” what we experience on the outside on our internal mental screen. Our external senses (our seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting) match our internal senses.How is it possible that five people can go to the very same party and recall it in five different ways?
Our gustatory system relates to our sense of taste. As a primitive system, it is not so valued in our modern world. NLPÂ doesn’t consider taste as one of the major representational systems. We generally don’t use it significantly to build our models of the world.
Someone with a preference for visual system processing will use their vision for memory and decision making. His or her main contact with the world will be through the eyes. Visual processing can take in lots of information. A picture can carry more data than sound or feeling. This means they are often adept at […]
Auditory digital processing is about the language and actual words that we use. Language is what we use to describe what is going on in our other senses. NLP talks about words as the auditory digital Representational System (referred to as the AD system), but it is not strictly a representational system.
Auditory system processing is linear and sequential. Visual system processing handles much more information. It is like a message on a tape compared to a picture. There are other valuable benefits however.
Our kinesthetic system is our bodily sensations and feelings. These feelings are not the names we give to our sensations that we call emotion. Emotions are mostly evaluations of a set of sensations or learned responses, originating in our brains and translated into body sensations.
The olfactory system or our sense of smell is one of the five major Representational Systems. It is rare to use olfactory processing as a primary preference in the modern world. Our sense of smell was probably more valuable in our cave person days.
