Categories and Mental Space
Mental space is our subjective representation of categories. Pleasant events are located in one area, unpleasant ones in another, and neutral ones in a third. Similarly, there are different places for friends and enemies, values and anti-values, and for the past, present, and future. By understanding how categories are organized in mental space, you can do many useful things: change your evaluation of groups of situations, turn problems into tasks, and replace beliefs.
Using categories can make many things much easier than with classic NLP techniques like shifting submodalities or collapsing anchors. In those cases, you need to gather information for each situation separately—find the critical submodality or set of resources. Here, it’s enough to move a situation from one category to another. You only need to identify the submodalities for these categories once.
When you need to reevaluate a large number of situations that are only united by the fact that you don’t like them, moving them from one category to another is extremely helpful.
Categories
Categories are fascinating tools. They let us avoid sorting every experience into “boxes” and set rules for interacting with each box. In the “chairs” box, we sit on them; in the “airplanes” box, we fly in them; in the “enemies” box, we avoid and dislike them; in the “values” box, we keep what’s important to us.
We categorize everything—objects, actions, ideas, people, relationships. In language, all verbs and nouns (except proper names) are categories. It seems almost innate, but it’s actually learned. For example, there’s an Aboriginal tribe in Australia for whom categorization is quite complex: they have different words for one crocodile, two crocodiles, and three crocodiles.
Here, we’ll focus more on evaluative categories: “pleasant situations,” “values,” “qualities,” “achieved goals,” or “needed relationships.” These categories are especially interesting—when you place an object in one, it changes its subjective characteristics. Move a situation from “unpleasant events” to “neutral events,” and it feels calmer; move a person from “important people” to “not important people,” and your way of interacting with them changes; move a behavior from “poorly controlled” to “controlled,” and you can manage it better. Categories operate at a higher logical level than the objects within them.
A good metaphor for evaluative categories is jars with solutions (like boxes, but sealed): one has sugar, another salt, a third vinegar, and a fourth pure water. Move a cheese cube from the salt jar to the vinegar jar, and it goes from salty to sour; move it to the water jar, and it becomes bland.
For an object to enter a category, it must meet certain criteria. For example, to make a situation neutral instead of unpleasant, you need to change your evaluation. NLP offers many ways to do this, from shifting submodalities to collapsing anchors. But you can also just move the situation from the “unpleasant” to the “pleasant” category, and that changes your perception.
You can also move a task from “difficult” to “solvable,” a person from “people I hate” to “people I’m indifferent to,” or a behavior from “ineffective” to “effective.” Often, this is much easier and faster, especially when dealing with groups of situations. Imagine you have thirty unpleasant situations, and you quickly make them neutral.
But this is just one technique. Objects are also organized within each category. For example, goals can be more or less important within the “goals” category, and decisions can be more or less successful within “decisions.” You can manage this organization to your advantage.
You can also change the characteristics of the categories themselves, and thus the objects within them. For example, you can make the “enemies” category less significant, or move the “past” category forward on your subjective timeline to bring it into greater focus.
When working with categories, you can:
- Move objects from one category to another
- Rearrange objects within a category
- Change the evaluation of the category itself (and the objects within it)
However, dividing things into categories isn’t always the best choice. Categorization is a discrete process—an object is either in one category or another (or a third or fourth, if there are more categories). Someone is either a good person or a bad one; you either handle a situation or you don’t. Sometimes, it’s more convenient not to divide things into categories and instead see everything as a continuum: every person has pros and cons; you handle this situation better than that one. This takes more time and effort to determine an object’s place on the continuum, but with categories, things are usually faster, though the division is more rigid.
For example, most people have three main categories: future, present, and past. But some people don’t divide time into categories—it’s a continuous process, and past, present, and future are just segments. Their timeline is organized differently.
For most people, beliefs are a separate category—things I believe in (and things I don’t, and things I doubt). For others, there’s no clear division: they just believe in different things with varying intensity—a continuum without clear boundaries.
Exercise
Think about what categories you use and by what criteria (examples in parentheses):
- Events in your life (importance: important/unimportant; evaluation: pleasant/unpleasant/neutral)
- Your goals (size: small/medium/large/global; status: achieved/in progress/ready to start/thinking about it)
- People (closeness: relatives/friends/acquaintances/strangers; evaluation: good/neutral/bad/enemies)
- Qualities (usefulness: necessary/useful/neutral/harmful)
Mental Space
Mental space is where we define relationships between many objects and distribute them into categories (if we do so). For most people, this happens in the visual system, simply because it’s the only one that allows us to work with many objects at once.
In this visual space, coordinates—distance, direction, height—are usually more important than other submodalities like brightness, size, or color.
To determine a place in mental space, it’s more convenient to use a cylindrical coordinate system (sorry for the math) rather than a rectangular Cartesian one. So, we have:
- Distance to the image
- Height: some prefer “from the floor,” others “from eye level”
- Right-left: you can use the clock method—straight ahead is 12 o’clock, right is 3, left is 9, behind is 6
In different contexts, changes in these coordinates mean different things: for example, the distance to an image when imagining events usually determines the intensity of the experience; in the context of time, it’s the temporal distance; in social relationships, it’s the closeness of a person.
The term “mental space” was introduced by Lucas Derks as the area for representing social categories and interactions, which he called the “social panorama.” The location of a person’s image in this space determines your attitude toward them: friends are in one place, enemies in another, neutral people in a third. Family members, coworkers, and people from your hometown will also be in different places.
This section will demonstrate the main principles of working with categories, including detailed descriptions of several techniques. If you swap “negative situations” and “positive situations” for “controlled behavior” and “uncontrolled behavior” or “desired qualities” and “undesired qualities,” the technique’s design doesn’t really change.
Exercise: Mapping Mental Space
This exercise helps you practice mapping mental space, since the mapping will change for each category system. We’ll practice with something simple: evaluating situations, but you can choose something else if you like.
- Decide what categories you use to evaluate situations.
- Pick 3–5 examples for each category.
- Determine the location in space (usually coded by position) for each category.
For example:
- I divide categories into negative, neutral, and positive. The negative area is 12 to 10 o’clock, 30–50 cm away, about 30 cm high at face level. The positive area is about the same size, also at face level, but to the right—1 to 3 o’clock. The neutral area is small, at stomach level in the center, a 20 cm diameter sphere at arm’s length.
From Category to Category
Many things can be done more easily using categories than with classic NLP techniques like shifting submodalities or collapsing anchors. In those cases, you need to gather information for each situation—find the critical submodality or resource set. Here, you just move a situation from one category to another, and you only need to identify the submodalities for these categories once.
When you need to reevaluate a large number of situations that are only united by the fact that you don’t like them, moving them from one category to another is extremely helpful.
These techniques follow a similar pattern:
- First, define the categories you’re working with and the criteria for dividing them.
- Calibrate your mental space—identify the submodalities of the needed categories.
- Explore the consequences of moving from one category to another—the pros and cons.
- Move objects from one category to another, with an ecological check and future pacing.
Remember, in different contexts, the same submodalities can mean different things: closeness to the center can mean more focus for goals, a neutral evaluation for situations, or more important people in the “social panorama.”
With this method, you can:
- Change your evaluation of situations by moving negative ones to neutral, neutral to positive
- Change beliefs (technique described below)
- Create or remove abilities and qualities
- Work with goals, for example, turning dreams into goals, unattainable goals into attainable ones, or constantly postponed goals into current tasks
- Change your evaluation of people, from distant to close, from harmful to neutral, from enemies to those requiring caution
Technique: Problems or Tasks
You can think about what you need to do as either a problem or a task. These are usually different ways of perceiving things, each with its own pros and cons. What counts as a “problem” or a “task” can vary greatly from person to person.
There may be other categories, but let’s take the typical case of just two. We’ll first define the differences between these categories and the criteria for assigning events to them.
For example, thinking of something as a “problem” makes it a challenge and is good for urgent matters. “Tasks” are better for long-term, step-by-step achievement. Or, “problems” are things you don’t like to do, while “tasks” are things you enjoy. There are many options.
Then, we’ll sort things—some go into “tasks,” some into “problems.”
- Define the categories
Decide what “problems” and “tasks” mean to you. What criteria do you use to separate them? - Calibrate your mental space
Choose 3–4 situations you see (or saw) as problems. Find where these are located in your mental space.
Example: to the left at 10 o’clock, below, 1.5–2 meters away, dark, still.
Similarly, pick 3–4 situations you see (or saw) as tasks. Find their location in your mental space.
Example: straight ahead at 12 o’clock, eye level, 70 cm–1 meter away, bright, like a movie. - What happens when you move them?
Move a couple of situations from “problems” to “tasks” and evaluate for each:
– How does this change your perception?
– What are the pros and cons?
– Is it more useful to think of this as a task or a problem?
Return the situations to their original category.
Take a couple of situations from “tasks” and move them to “problems.” Answer the same questions. Return them to their original category. - List of situations
Make a list of situations you want to change in your life. Sort them into “problem” or “task” based on how you currently see them. - Move them
Now, one by one, move (or leave) situations from your list into the categories that fit them best.
For each situation after moving, check:
– How did your perception of the situation change?
– Will this way of seeing the situation harm you?
– How will your behavior in this situation change?