VAKOG – The Sensory Structure of Your Inner World

You don’t simply experience your world, you construct it through your senses. In the VAKOG workshop, you’ll discover how images, voices, and bodily sensations guide your thinking and decision-making. Once you understand how your inner perception works, you can consciously change it—and suddenly, entirely new possibilities emerge.

In NLP, we like to say: “The map is not the territory,” meaning that our perception does not reflect the world itself, but only a filtered construction of reality. This subjective version of reality is an individually structured representation of it. What matters now is: In what form this inner structure is organized.

Everything you experience begins as a sensory impression. Light hits your retina, sound waves cause the eardrum to vibrate, pressure and temperature are registered through the skin, and chemical molecules trigger sensations of smell or taste. These stimuli are translated into electrical and biochemical processes via your nervous system—and in the brain, images, sounds, and sensations emerge from them.

What reaches consciousness is not the physical stimulus itself, but its neural representation. This is why NLP speaks of representational systems: external events appear internally in a specific sensory form.

But these representations are not copies of the outside world. They are structured, sensorially organized forms of experience. You do not think in abstract data packets, but in images, inner voices, bodily sensations, and qualities of smell and taste. Even complex thoughts often appear as inner dialogue or as visual imagery.

It is precisely these sensory forms of organization that NLP bundles into the model of representational systems—summarized in the acronym VAKOG.

V visual: Images, colors, shapes, brightness, and spatial arrangement
A auditory: Sounds, voices, volume, timbre, and rhythm
K kinesthetic: bodily sensations, pressure, temperature, movement, and emotional states
O olfactory: Smells
G gustatory: Taste qualities

These five modalities form the fundamental building blocks of your inner map. They are where information is stored, recalled, planned, and evaluated. Every experience you have is organized in one or more of these forms. In psychology, the term is simply the technical term for a sense.

When you recall a situation, it does not appear as abstract information. Perhaps you see the room in front of you where the conversation took place. Perhaps you hear a person’s voice again. Perhaps you feel a tightening in your stomach or a pleasant warmth in your chest. Experience does not manifest neutrally—it manifests in a sensory structure.

VAKOG reveals the sensory modality through which reality is internally represented. It describes the architecture of subjective experience—not to categorize people, but to understand how thinking, feeling, and decision-making are concretely structured.

Description of the Perceptual Channels

Let’s take a closer look at these five sensory channels. Each of them possesses its own qualities, typical modes of expression, and characteristic effects on perception and behavior.

Visual Channel
The visual channel organizes experience into images. This does not refer only to external seeing, but also to the internal representation of experiences as scenes, colors, shapes, or sequences of movement. When you represent things visually, thoughts appear as images in your mind’s eye. Memories show up as still frames or short film sequences, the future is imagined as a projection, and decisions are made after you have formed a clear picture of the available options.

Perhaps you’re familiar with this moment: Someone explains a complex situation to you, and suddenly you say, “Now I see what you mean.” This doesn’t refer to the physical act of seeing, but to the emergence of a coherent inner structure. Understanding becomes a visual act here: Only when connections become visible does orientation emerge.

Internal images possess qualities: they can appear bright or dark, large or small, near or far. These differences directly influence the intensity of the experience—a large, bright image usually has a stronger impact than a small, faint one in the distant background.

Auditory Channel
While the visual channel represents experience in images, in the auditory channel it appears as sound. Here, experiences manifest not primarily as scenes, but as voices, tones, dialogues, noises, or rhythmic patterns. Meaning arises from what is heard—externally or internally.

In an auditory inner representation, you might hear the tone of a conversation you had yesterday. Perhaps your conversation partner’s voice lingers, and you notice the way something was said more than the content—friendly, sharp, hesitant, or decisive. And not infrequently, an inner commentary runs parallel to this: a quiet voice that evaluates, explains, or questions.

It is precisely this inner dialogue—often referred to in NLP as auditory-digital (Ad)—plays a central role in the auditory channel. It is the voice in your head that weighs arguments, formulates sentences, asks questions, or comments on decisions. Some people think primarily in images. Others think in words.

Kinesthetic Channel
While the visual channel organizes experience into images and the auditory channel structures it into sounds, reality emerges in the kinesthetic channel as a physical experience. Here, the focus is not on what you see or hear—but on what you feel.

Kinesthetic representation encompasses bodily sensations and emotional states—feelings are not abstract here, but manifest as concrete physical experiences. Fear might manifest as tightness in the chest. Joy as warmth in the stomach. Tension as pressure in the shoulders.

When you represent things kinesthetically, you don’t primarily assess situations through images or arguments, but through an inner bodily sensation. Even before you formulate a conscious analysis, an impression arises in your body. Perhaps as a sense of openness in your chest, pressure in your stomach, or tension in your shoulders. You then say things like: “That feels right.” Or: “Something isn’t right here.”

Olfactory and Gustatory Channels
In addition to sight, hearing, and touch, there is another, often underestimated dimension of perception: the sense of smell and taste. The olfactory channel rarely comes to the forefront of our conscious awareness in everyday life—yet it possesses an astonishing intensity. A specific scent can instantly transport you to a past situation. Not as an abstract memory, but as a vivid experience.

The gustatory channel is surprisingly present in language and evaluation. Experiences can be “bitter,” appear “sweet,” or leave a “bland aftertaste.” Taste serves as an immediate indicator of approval or disapproval.

Learning with all the senses – the VAKOG approach in practice

A model from NLP that is encountered time and again is the so-called VAKOG model. It describes how we organize our experiences through various sensory channels. In everyday life, sight and hearing usually dominate. But the more senses are involved, the more firmly an experience is anchored in memory—and the more lasting the learning becomes.

Imaginary Journeys – Experiencing Lessons in the Mind
One method is the guided imagery exercise. Here, you are invited to close your eyes and imagine a situation while being verbally guided through a scene. Background sounds or appropriate music can accompany the journey. From an NLP perspective, this method utilizes a principle also described in the so-called Milton Model: open, vivid language activates inner imagery and enables people to contribute their own experiences and images.

The Logical Levels – Understanding Figures as a Lived World
Another model from NLP that can prove surprisingly helpful for bringing lessons to life is Robert Dilts’ so-called logical levels. This model distinguishes between different levels of human action: Environment, Behavior, Abilities, Values, Identity, and Vision. By making this timeline visible and walkable in the room, learners can not only mentally follow developments but also physically experience them.

When I summarize my teaching experiences from recent years, a clear impression emerges: learning becomes particularly effective when content is not merely explained but made tangible. NLP complements existing didactic and pedagogical approaches by focusing more strongly on the inner processes of learning. It does not offer ready-made formulas, but rather perspectives and tools that can enrich instruction and make it more experiential.