While his influence goes largely unacknowledged, Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) made many fundamental contributions to the field of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). For instance, it was Bateson who first put Grinder and Bandler in touch with his friend Milton Erickson in the early 1970s (just as he had introduced Jay Haley to Erickson a decade earlier). Moreover, it was Bateson’s work in communications theory that provided the theoretical underpinnings for NLP as a discipline. The NLP notions of “meta position,” “meta communication,” “meta messages,” and the detection of verbal and non-verbal incongruence, for instance, were derived directly from Bateson’s theories regarding different levels of learning, communication and change.