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Bateson was a British anthropologist and author who influenced several of NLP’s leading proponents. His father, a geneticist who coined the word ‘genetics’, named him after the famous Russian geneticist Gregor Mendel.

Bateson wrote on a range of topics including communications, systems theory/cybernetics, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, biological evolution and genetics. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his first attempts to synthesize cybernetic ideas with anthropological data. He was ‘ethnologist’ at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Palo Alto from 1949 until1962. At the time he was married to Margaret Mead, another famous anthropologist, who also worked with him on many projects.

Later, Bateson’s communication studies were extended to the animal kingdom and, together with his then wife, Lois, he kept about a dozen octopuses in their living-room! He went on to become director of a dolphin laboratory in the Virgin Islands, where he continued his studies on communications in animals for about a year. In 1963 he went to the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii to work on problems of animal and human communication and it was there that he wrote most of his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).

Bateson also led the Palo Alto Group and lectured at the University of Santa Cruz at the time that Bandler and Grinder were developing NLP. He was a neighbour of Bandler’s and it was he who suggested that Bandler and Grinder visit Milton Erickson (see Erickson).

Bateson considered that ideas were not abstract concepts, but the basis for the way people live their lives. He said that people should think and act systemically, by allowing both conscious and unconscious processes to shape their decisions, and by developing congruity in diverse parts of the mind. In the preface to Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mark Engel says:

The central idea in this book is that we create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads … but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in … For a man to change his basic, perception-determining beliefs … he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.