Someone posted the following interesting article to my mailing list, about a study that demonstrates that we make bodily movements in accordance with our metaphors for time:

Thinking about time makes you sway Boing Boing

Those who have been to my workshops know that I use a few techniques that play around with body swaying movements. When I demonstrate these to an NLP-savvy group, someone always relates them to timelines:

Forward/Backward:


Circular Thinking:


It's particularly interesting to me in that ideomotor movements (which these are) appear to be based in the mirror neuron system, which helps us to process embodied metaphors, among much else.

Any thoughts on how this info might be useful?

God knows but its really interesting!! I'm gunna have a crappy attempt anyway... Could you use it in a kind of EMDR/IEMT/EMI kind of way for someone who has specific issues with a particular context pay attention to their "sways" then recode it it by swaying it other ways while holding the context in mind? I'm not sure I would immediatley say "timelimes" purely because I suspect the sway would be representative of there own embodied timeline which is probably learned then embodied? My initial response would be vestibular - dunno but its an extremely interesting post

How about temporal accessing cues, for starters?

Hi Philip

Great videos, clear, professional and fun to watch.

I will use these processes with horse riders after experimenting myself. I use something similar at the moment but I think the circular thinking one with be awesome with fantastic effects on the horses desire and ability to go forward or backwards and sideways too. And I think the exercise will reveal a lot to the rider about the horse's actions - I think some mysteries will be blown away.

Can't wait to experiment but it is too icy here to take horses out.

Will post again once I have some results.

Thanks this is really useful.

Carol, I'd love to know how that works out. We do know that horses respond to human ideomotor movements - that goes all the way back to the experiments with Clever Hans.

Clever Hans - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm curious how the time element might come into play here. Would the horse have to share the particular metaphor (future is ahead, past behind) for that to be useful?