Working with Modalities/Sub-modalities
Your mental pictures, sounds and feelings all have certain qualities. Your pictures, for example, have brightness and colour, your sounds have rhythm and tone, your feelings have a certain texture and temperature. These qualities are known in NLP as ‘submodalities’. The senses (VAKOG) are the ‘modalities’ we use to think, so the qualities of the sense experience are submodalities. Although they are known as submodalities, they are not inferior, under or beneath the modalities, but are an integral part of them. You cannot have sense experience without these qualities.
Submodalities are how we structure our experience.
Visual
Submodalities
Associated/Dissociated
Seen through own eyes or looking on at self.
Colour or black & white.
Framed or unframed.
Two or three dimensional.
Left or right or up or down.
Near or far.
Bright or dark.
Focused clear or blurred.
Still or smooth or jerky.
Fast or slow.
Large or small.
Auditory Submodalities
Verbal; or non verbal
Words; or sounds.
Volume; loud or soft.
Tone; harsh or soft.
Timbre; thin or full
(Timbre=distinctive characteristics)
Distance; near or far
Duration; continuous or discontinuous.
Speed; fast or slow.
Clarity; clear or muffled.
Pitch; high or low.
Kinaesthetic
Submodalities
Location; where in the body
Intensity; high or low.
Pressure hard or soft.
Texture; rough or smooth.
Weight; light or heavy.
Temperature; hot or cold.
Duration; long or short.
Shape; regularity, square, oblong.
Movement; still or moving Olfactory & Gustatory
Smell and taste are an important part of experiences, but are not easily broken down into submodalities, except in a laboratory of nutrition and flavour chemists.
Because tastes and smells connect directly with parts of our brain that govern emotion, they can quickly change our state. Smells are particularly evocative, the smell of fresh baked bread or perfume will suddenly remind us of someone we know or transport us back to our child hood.
Tastes seem to have four components; sweet, sour, salty and bitter.
Attempting to change these seems to make little difference.