January 5, 2015

January 5, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This writing is done in the afternoon instead of in the early morning. Different circumstances make different stimuli available, which evoke different behavior. Some of this writer’s writings were accidentally deleted, but luckily he was able to retrieve the documents, because he had send his writings to a friend. Much of his writings would have been lost if he hadn’t shared it with someone. This writer is in a good mood, because he is having his writings nicely organized, which makes it easier to send it to others. He also feels more ready now to share his writings with others. This wasn’t always the case. He looks forward to sharing his work. 

He anticipates how others will respond to what he writes. He doesn’t want them to think that what they are reading is something he is saying to them. Rather, he wants them to realize that they are probably imagining that someone is talking to them while in fact they are only reading these written words.  They may have thoughts about what is written here, but these thoughts are not part of any conversation, they are part of them just talking with themselves and they are, perhaps, due to this writing, aware that these words are behaved by them. 

Since they are already talking with themselves covertly, privately, they might as well talk with themselves overtly, publicly. If they would use this text to talk with themselves overtly, they can hear their own sound while they speak. This writing is then an opportunity to experience Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) as one person. SVB can also be experienced by two or many persons, but usually this doesn’t last very long, because speakers are not familiar enough with it to be able to continue. We have SVB each time the circumstances are conducive to it, but usually we have no clue as to what exactly makes it possible. If we knew more accurately what makes it possible, we would have it more often, just because we could. 

The scientific explanation of behavior, that some antecedent stimulus evokes a response, or that some consequence either reinforces or punishes a response, or that some postcedent event increases or decreases behavior, easily leads people to conclude that they see or hear or otherwise notice the evocative stimulus or take note of the fact that their behavior has positive or negative consequences and then decide to respond. Although the dominant NVB culture perpetuates this fiction, our inner self-decider doesn’t exist.  Every night when we sleep in our bed, we are perfectly okay without such a behavior-managing agent. Sleep is better when we forget who we are. Our inability to do so causes us insomnia. One may argue, that we don’t need to behave in the night, that our busy, imaginary self can get a rest, but, when we consider the ingredients of dreams, which are just another kind behavior, we find all sorts of environmental independent variables that stimulate, reinforce, trigger, punish, shape and extinguish, our behavior, the dream, the dependent variable. 

Behavior is tremendously complex and besides the relatively simple three-term contingency, consisting of an evocative stimulus, a response and a reinforcing or punishing consequence, the antecedent stimulus can be expanded to innumerable amounts of other contingencies, called n-term contingencies, which each contain “contextual antecedent stimuli, each of which functions to alter the function of another stimulus, until we reach the stimulus that actually evokes the behavior.” (Ledoux, 2014, p.287). These so-called “function-altering stimuli” can alter “the function of another stimulus from the status of a neutral stimulus to an evocative stimulus.” So, let’s say we want to visit a friend on Labor Day. Because we have been drinking, a police car is suddenly no longer experienced by us as a neutral stimulus, but as a punitive stimulus. We stop our car in a side street and let someone, who didn’t drink drive and arrive safely at our friend’s house, without getting a DUI.