Whoa there "Lone Stranger", or guy who has, without introduction or exchange of pleasantries, waded into battle against a respected and intelligent member of the forum with the godawful argument of "well you can't use science to test everything". Reading your post made my liver fizz and my blood turn to acid.

Let me say from the off that I believe most NLP works. There is absolutely no reason to think it wouldn't; the human brain is very easily manipulated by someone with a lot of confidence and a few tricks up their sleeve. Just watch one of Derren Brown's live shows and you'll see what I'm on about. However, that certain memories should provoke certain specific eye movements is absolute bollocks. There is a key problem with any explanation of it (aside from the fact it flies in the face of even the most basic scientific thought or even common sense). It has been implied that the eyes' reaction is involuntary, fast and, when repeated, absolutely consistent, suggesting it is a reflex. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but there is only one reflex associated with eye movement, and that is in response to danger, an opportunity to feed or to mate. I understand that, via Brodman's Area 17 (primary visual cortex), it incorporates the reticular formation, which in turn innervates the occulomotor nucleus and causes the eye to move in order to focus on the situation in question. There is no such reflex associated with any part of the amygdala (an area of the brain associated with memories and emotions), least of all with any occulomotor or abducens nuclei (the only nuclei which control eye movements). Both are found in the brainstem and, as far as we know, have few, if any, connections with areas of the limbic system associated with memory and emotions. QED, the eye thing is rhubarb.

However, this scientific debate over whether the eye thing works or not is mostly superfluous, because it's wierd and creepy and I will never learn it. Hypnotising women into sleeping with me is only just above rape on the morality scale as far as I'm concerned. And besides, wouldn't you rather get good with women by becoming the most awesome person you can be, living life to the fullest and having a bloody good time? Maybe it's just me, but that option sounds preferable to learning how to manipulate people into simply doing your bidding with the likes of Ross Jeffries and all that crowd. You thing you're going to have a meaningful relationship with any woman you've hypnotised into bed?

Anyway, I digress. The real reason I'm writing this is your sweeping disregard for the scientific community and its methods of analysing the world we live in. I've taken the trouble of looking at some of the references in Kowalski's link, and of the five or so there, at least four come from reputable sources. The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology is a respected journal with an impact factor of nearly 5, for example. The international journal of mental health has an H-index of 9, which is certainly enough for the purposes of this discussion. The only people who wholesaledly dismiss scientific evidence as "opinion" or "wrong" are almost exclusively idiots. Zealous religious types, fans of homeopathy, astrologers and the like.

Look, science doesn't lie. It's not written by opinionated people who pluck ideas out of the air and aggressively push them in order to make a profit. Science is cold, hard fact - the testing of the laws of nature and how eveything works therein. A scientific investigation is rigorously controlled and tested, repeated endlessly and statistically analysed in order to give the best possible view of the facts. Even then, should this investigation want to be published in a scientific journal, it will be subject to merciless scrutiny. Hell, as an undergraduate even I was accustomed to tearing papers to shreds, so you can imagine what professors of clinical psychology would do to a bad paper. Long story short, if a paper ends up in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, it's probably got more of an idea of the science of NLP than some pseudo-scientific hypnotist with a fast buck to make.

Oh and please post an introduction if you're serious about contributing to the forum. It really fucks me off when people try and push their opinions about life onto me without so much as a hello. Christ, even Jehova's Witnesses say hello before they spew out bullshit and those people are my least favourite in the entire world.