Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a concept that evolved so as to study and duplicate highly successful human behavior, skills and competence and then modeling it. This model could then be further developed or enhanced such that a transferable model could be developed and learnt by the humans so as to improve their skills, creativity etc. or to cure patients with phobias. It is also being employed in a big way in Management Concepts like Sales and Marketing, Advertisements and Organizational behaviors etc. Education sector is another potential area for NLP to be applied, once the computer models are ready and implemented.
NLP was developed in early 1970’s by an information scientist Richard Bandler and a linguist, John Grinder (John Grinder, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John Grinder, n.d) at University of California, Santa Cruz. They observed that people having similar education, training, background and experience had widely varied results. They wanted a reason for this and know their secrets of success, and how they achieved it.