Hi John and Lewis, Thankyou both for your very useful feedback (and to Michael for the original article). Lewis, I take your point about the limitations of approaching such issues at an intellectual level, but I too am limited by not having easy access to a coach/observer when experimenting - if you're ever up in Sheffield, let's meet up and play some games! Inspired by this thread, I bought some juggling balls and a simple manual last week, and have been experimenting/learning since. I've also recently been using techniques like meditation and image-streaming, to build a better relationship with my unconscious ...and generally paying more attention to the states I'm in day-to-day (driving is a good one for me!) On an intellectual level, I'm trying to draw out the variables that differentiate these "altered states" from "normal" states, and from each other - hence noticing the variables that might "make the difference" in the Alphabet Game. So far, I'm only competent with the basic exercises of juggling, but I take your point about the utility of the comfortable/competent state. In fact, I wonder if within the "comfort zone" (from "dead-easy" to "on the edge of competence"), there might be several useful states to anchor? I'd also like to anchor that "playful-but-fascinated-learning" state that comes between the "edge of competence" and your "YES YES YES!!" state. Could you expand a little on how you might use a sliding anchor to "capture" these states (I'm fairly new to NLP)? I've been doing some guided meditation techniques, where when you achieve a certain state (clear-mind for example), you ask your unconscious to give you a symbol (picture, word/phrase, feeling) to represent the state and recall it later. Is that a similar idea? Thanks for the story about your patient, reminds me of some of the "tasking" stories in "The Teaching Tales of Milton Eriksson" which I'm currently reading. Since reading John's reply about the important variables in a New Code game, my mind has been buzzing! I have a few tentative ideas (on which I'd very much appreciate your feedback), and a further question. The question first - "How random is random?" - in the Alphabet Game, the initial pattern of linked letters and actions is generated randomly, but as the player passes through it several times, it is fixed (for the duration of that game) - giving the mind a chance to (unconsciously) learn the pattern. Is that a deliberate design-decision (giving the brain's pattern-recognition/learning circuits a work-out), or just a necessary limitation of the format? Would there be advantages if you could generate completely random stimuli? And a couple of initial ideas, thinking aloud - 1. Taking juggling as an excellent start-point, how can we build-in other variables? There are many different "patterns" of juggling. Once you were confident in 3 or more, and could switch between them without stopping, you could use some external stimuli as a signal to switch. For example, you could have the TV/Radio playing in the background, and associate certain trigger-words to certain patterns - so whenever somebody said the word "but", you switch to Pattern 3... and so on. You'd want to change those trigger-words each time you played. If you're using different-coloured balls, you could setup some random external timer, and everytime it fires, you have to say aloud the colour of the ball in your right hand? 2. It should be possible to build a computer program that flashes onscreen random numbers, colours, words, letters, pictures, or combinations thereof. Then you'd use that as the stimulus for movements, verbalisations, etc. If we knew someone really clever, we could link-up various monitoring devices (heart-rate, blood pressure, etc) with realtime onscreen indicators, while you're playing the game, to give you clues as to when you are achieving the high-performance state! Hope that's helpful, all feedback gratefully received! Cheers, Jon