April 15, 2015

April 15, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

I was wearing black clothes to class yesterday night and my lecture was powerful. I was well-prepared to speak on Social Psychology and we covered a lot of ground. I spoke of various researchers, such as Dweck, Ash, James, Milgram and Zimbardo and the class was responding positively and engaged. It was noticeable that for many students it has become easier to talk. Many comments were made which added lively examples of what was addressed by me in the lecture. This dynamic going back and forth between the class and me was enjoyable and the time went by very fast.

I just woke up from a dream in which I was talking with a guru. I had been listening to him for quite some time. Like me, yesterday night, he was on fire and he was making everybody laugh. Because he had broken out of some pattern of formality, I showed him my gratitude by thanking him and by saying “I love it when you speak like that.” For what seemed minutes, I sat there silently in front of him, my hands folded, my eyes closed, my head bend down, all the way to my stomach. Then, I woke up from this dream and I realized that I had been dreaming about my own lecture. 

As this writing about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) describes the events of my life as a psychology instructor at Butte College, my neural structure is continuously changed by the conditioning processes it mediates. In ordinary language we call it ‘practice’, but in behaviorology, the natural science of human behavior, we avoid such agential words, because they don’t explain anything. There is no self, who is doing the practice, but there are only stimuli, for instance, the students in my class or the information from the textbook, who affect primarily my phono-receptors and my light-receptors. 

Actually, it makes no sense to talk about my phono-receptors or my light-receptors, because anyone only mediates a response to the extent that receptors are working properly, that is, to the extent that their nervous system is or was conditioned by previous stimuli. Mediation, the process in which, after a threshold has been reached, the receptor transduces energy into nerve impulses, is the same for everyone. It requires SVB, however, to wrap our ‘minds’ around the often overlooked fact that “A transduced energy transfer to neural structures of any sense mode can function as an eliciting or evocative stimulus” (italics added) (Ledoux, 2014). In other words, one response can elicit or evoke another response or a whole chain of responses. 

These are referred to as behavior-behavior relations and play a fundamental role in learning and consciousness. My success as an instructor depends on what is learned from the feedback that is received from my students. It is not about me doing the receiving or the learning. My ability to teach, to affect change and to stimulate learning, depends on whether I am learning. When I receive reinforcement from my students this means I am getting better at teaching. “The explanation for why the more skillful performance occurs, however, resides not in the improved structure but with the stimuli that evoke the performance and the reinforcers that the performance produces, reinforcers that improve the structure” (Ledoux, 2014, p.479).