April 13, 2015

April 13, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

My wife and I worked very hard in our yard yesterday and things are finally beginning to come together. I wheel barreled in a lot of gravel, which is now covering the ground. We made a nice place to sit and got ourselves two blue comfortable chairs. Also, I made a little bridge that crosses the creek bed. It was quite an ordeal to saw that wood, because my saw was blunt. We need to get a new one. I asked the neighbor’s saw and got it done. The bridge still needs to be stabilized. Our gardener can get us some free bigger rocks from somewhere. That would look great. We are going to plant some grasses, a tree, a bush and some agaves. 

When Bonnie disagrees with me, she raises her voice and speaks in a tone I don’t like. Since we have to decide many things together about our garden, we have moments of irritation. This is part of doing something together. Our disagreements are always settled quickly. Under such circumstances instances of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) are replaced by instances of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). I enjoy doing projects with her and it is such a pleasure to see her work at the vegetable garden. She planted tomatoes, eggplant, okra, basil, squash and cantaloupe. She is careful and precise, but sometimes she is wrong or refuses to see to see things my way. I have given in to her many times, but with some things I want to have my way. She first didn’t want to have agaves, but after repeated requests consented to have them. There are still some plants and grasses that need to be bought and planted, but the big rearrangements of the yard have all been done. It looks beautiful.

Working in the yard, evening out and raking gravel and sawing wood for the bridge, are neuromuscular behaviors, but thinking about Bonnie, sometimes upset about her demanding ways, is neural behavior. Thus, consciousness is considered by behaviorologists as neural behavior. A person doesn’t do anything physical while being conscious. To be conscious, our body doesn’t need to be involved in action and no neuromuscular behavior is needed.

Writing is a public response, but thoughts that precede this writing are a private response. Reporting these responses involves overt verbal behavior. Although only I currently have access to this writing, in principle, many may have access to it. However, only I can have access to my thoughts, that is, only a public of one has access to stimuli of private speech. While learning about SVB it is important that we don’t revert to the use of agential terms.


We are talking about an auditory stimulus, a sound, someone’s voice, “a form of energy that affects our phonoreceptors, which produce aural responses, what, in agential terms, we call hearing” (Ledoux, 2014). Before someone’s sound is affecting us, that is, “before a stimulus energy trace can affect a receptor, the energy trace must reach the necessary physiological threshold” (Ledoux, 2014). Sometimes we don’t hear someone, because they don’t talk loud enough. In that case, the stimulus can’t affect the receptor, as it is not strong enough to reach the threshold. At other times, we don’t hear someone, because we are not consciously listening. We are not paying attention to how they sound as our attention is only going to what they are saying. In the latter, a gating-mechanism seems to be at work. 

The person has the ability to perceive someone’s sound, but only if he or she pays attention to how this person sounds rather than to what this person is saying. Once this shift from what the person is saying to how the person sounds, which, by the way, both are overt responses, has been made, overt responses can and will be made by such a person, which involve few covert responses. In other words, in SVB, the conversation will be under stimulus control of the sound of our voice. You can compare it to driving which is under stimulus control of what is seen along the road. We don’t need to pay conscious attention to each of these stimuli as we habitually drive from point A to point B. Often we don’t even realize that we drove, because we were listening to the radio or we were having all sorts of thoughts. 

Driving safely, without having to consciously pay attention, is possible because our nonverbal driving behavior is under stimulus control of what we see. Our driving requires neither covert nor overt verbal behavior. A similar nonverbal process is possible when our vocal verbal behavior is under direct stimulus control of how we sound. In that case, it is because we can talk without having private speech that we will be able to have a good conversation. When our driving behavior is not under direct stimulus control of our seeing behavior, we would not be able to drive very safely. Our daydreaming or private speech will then be so distracting that it leads to accidents. Similarly, if during our vocal verbal behavior, that is, during Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), our talking is not and cannot be under direct stimulus control our sound, all sorts of ‘accidents’ may happen and we will be distracted.

In NVB, in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency, the speaker’s voice causes raw-sensation behavior in the listener. This “first behavior” is a “covert behavior, in a chain that includes covert and then overt behavior” (Ledoux, 2014). It is important to understand here that raw-sensation behavior is elicited when a stimulus affects a receptor. If there is little or no verbal report involved, respondent sensory perception of reality is merely a simple awareness behavior. Only during SVB can we describe and express overtly and correctly the direct stimulus control exerted by listening behavior over our speaking behavior. 

What happens when auditory stimuli affect phono-receptors while we speak is comparable to what happens when visual stimuli affect photo-receptors while we drive. As long as driving behavior is under direct discriminative control of what we see, we don’t need to see what we see consciously. However, after we have been stopped by the police, because we broke the speed limit and had to show our papers and got a ticket, we will drive more consciously. Temporarily, our covert verbal behavior takes the place of direct stimulus control and we make sure that we don’t speed anymore. In a similar fashion, we can talk without having to think much about it, as long as we are not called out for anything that we say. When someone is disagreeing with us, rejecting us and making us stop talking, our attention suddenly shifts from nonverbal well-being to verbal stress. Initially, we were fine just talking and there was no need to be anxious or upset about the verbal, because we agreed and we understood, but because of NVB, we were disconnecting from the nonverbal and becoming imprisoned by the verbal.