January 7, 2015

January 7, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer 

Dear Reader, 

 

The most important thing to be understood about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is that it can’t be understood unless one experiences it. As long as one tries to understand it, one is incapable of experiencing it. This is not some game of words, this is really how SVB works. Only if one stops trying to understand it, one will be able to understand it. Understanding comes as a consequence of one’s experience of one’s body while one speaks. Without such an experience, one will produces Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which is never found out right away, but only later on, in retrospect. 

It is our body which experiences the consequences of human interaction, not our so-called mind. It is our body which is evoked into action or inaction, due to the way in which we communicate. If our body is punished, as it most certainly is while we are aversively stimulated by NVB, the consequence of this aversive stimulation is always a decrease of behavior. We don’t see this, because we are more inclined to pay attention to the behavior that is occurring and not to the behavior that is not occurring or that cannot occur. If, on the other hand, our body is positively reinforced, as it would be when it is stimulated by the contingency which makes SVB possible, there is always an increase of behavior. This increase is visible, audible and measurable. The lack of behavior or the limited occurrence of behavior is always related to disembodied communication, or NVB, because NVB decreases behavior. If we want to increase behavior we must have SVB. 

Only when we look at why behavior occurs, of what behavior is a function, do we have a chance of finding out what causes it. Much of our behavior is caused by how we communicate. Lack of control, excess of speech and distractibility, are based on the low rates of focused talking and listening, which defines NVB. Total or partial absence of speech, as seen in autism, is also believed to be a consequence of NVB. Also, the onset of dementia happens earlier due to the relatively low amounts of SVB. Lying, criminality, as well as chaotic and psychotic behavior, is caused by how we talk. We don’t want to look at how our way of communicating causes many problems, because we would have to admit that, with our current beliefs, we can’t change it. When we say that individuals are responsible for their own actions, we refuse to look at our NVB manner of talking. This writing is not to make us individually responsible either. 

NVB conditions enduring changes in our neural structures. SVB is a different kind of conditioning, leading to different response mediation. We use the same words, but how we say them makes all the difference. The function-altering consequences of evocative verbal stimuli are different in SVB and NVB. It is impossible for SVB stimuli to become “more effective in inducing the neural mediation of a response” (Ledoux, 2014, p. 289), if there is no repeated exposure to such stimuli. However, “competition among antecedent stimuli” determines a selection process, in which even those rare occasions that we can have SVB “strengthens all the antecedent functional relations.”