NLP – fact or fiction

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NLP – Neuro-Linguistic Programming – is a psychological approach originally developed in 1970s California by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. It was radically different from mainstream therapies of the time, offering its users fast results instead of the years of commitment required for psychoanalysis. But for all its commercial success and numerous devotees, NLP is seen by its critics as just another pseudo-science without robust evidence to support its claims. So does NLP genuinely help with powerful behavioural change, or can its achievements be explained by the placebo effect?

We get literally hundreds of emails a year from "master NLP practitioners" making various claims and requests. They want to know if they can study with Derren, learn to "reach a higher level of NLP understanding" in order to recreate his effects through a greater knowledge of refined techniques. We refuse them all.

The fact is DB doesn't use NLP in his act despite the claims of other people, his unique combination of trickery and conjuring is deeply routed in psychology, illusion and even sleight of hand. They are mostly self taught techniques, reproduced  in the interest of entertainment and illusion and have not been handed down via expensive week long courses in Florida. If your forced to question reality, confused and amazed or feel that your thought pattern has been somehow controlled and you are unaware how – then he has succeeded and that's as far as it goes.

NLP takes a step further by recreating similar, albeit less impressive, effects and makes actual claims of heightened psychological wellbeing , rapid mental recovery and phobia control re-patterning (many of these are trademarked so they may disappear).

Some hardcore psychologists claim NLP is entirely placebo, it should be dismissed as cleverly constructed psychobabble in order to temporality influence you right up until the cheque arrives. However there's another group of social scientist that claim it at least holds some weight – not hard evidence, but at least some weight that delivers results and once combined with traditional methods could be the future of psychology and mental health.

William Little, journalist and author of The Psychic Tourist, finds out for himself what it's like to experience NLP techniques, meets those who have used it to change their lives and interviews its co-founder Richard Bandler, the charismatic exponent of so-called "persuasion engineering".

Available here until the 6th Dec 2010