Neurolinguistic Priming [Oscar Wilde]
All I ask of you is to perform a certain scientific experiment. You go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors that you do there don’t affect you. If in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject. You would not turn a hair. You would not believe that you were doing anything wrong. On the contrary, you would probably feel that you were benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind. What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde, 1890
I love the subtle distortions employed by Wilde’s characters Lord Henry and, later, Dorian Gray – but a small sampling of the power of words over reality and a prescient indictment of such manipulation which, in many ways, seems far ahead of its time…
Politics – Public Relations – Disinformation – News Media
What’s in a name?
That which we call “persuasion”
by any other name has results the same
Falsehoods – Distortions – Manipulations – Prevarications
Neuro-linguistic Programming places great deal of importance on non-verbal communication and body language. However, our language also plays a significant role in effective communication. It embodies not just the vocabulary we use in our dialect, which is around seven percent of the communication, but also the language we use in our brain. Every word we use has an impact on the communication and individual words can carry deep meanings.
