Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a pseudoscientific approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy that first appeared in Richard Bandler and John Grinder's book The Structure of Magic I (1975). NLP asserts a connection between neurological processes, language, and acquired behavioral patterns, and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life. According to Bandler and Grinder, NLP can treat problems such as phobias, depression, tic disorders, psychosomatic illnesses, near-sightedness, allergy, the common cold, and learning disorders, often in a single session, and can model the skills of exceptional people so that anyone can acquire them. NLP has been adopted by some hypnotherapists and by companies running seminars marketed as leadership training. No scientific evidence supports the claims made by NLP advocates, and it has been called a pseudoscience; scientific reviews have shown that NLP is based on outdated metaphors of the brain's inner workings inconsistent with current neurological theory and contains numerous factual errors, and that research favoring NLP contained significant methodological flaws while higher-quality studies failed to reproduce its claims.