April 16, 2015

April 16, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) alter our nervous system. These neural changes, which make us mediate behavior differently, happen because of the functional effects of stimuli: our voices. However, in SVB we are conscious of our voice, but in NVB we remain unconscious about our sound. Stated differently, in SVB we are overt about how we sound, but in NVB, we are covert about it. In other words, we will continue to have NVB as long as we don’t talk about how we sound. 

We must differentiate between respondent hearing and operant hearing. During the preverbal stages of development, unconditioned stimulus energies at the baby’s phono-receptors in his or her ears produced by the mother’s voice, elicit unconscious hearing as raw sensations. This is unconditioned respondent neural hearing behavior. Conditioned hearing happens because other stimuli occur together with this unconditioned stimulus. After the mother’s voice has become paired with food, attention and comfort, these stimuli elicit conditioned hearing responses in the baby. And, the baby at some point starts to speak when the mother’s voice is paired with words. 

  

I will now turn to the covert and overt aspects of operant hearing. Covert operant hearing can be a response which is evoked by someone’s voice, by an overt antecedent stimulus, but it can also be a response to a previous covert antecedent response. In the former, the listener is listening to the speaker, but in the latter, the listener is not listening to the speaker, but to him or to herself. The distinction is crucially important because during such covert hearing we neither talk about what we have heard overtly nor covertly.

Although in overt operant hearing we can talk about what we have heard overtly as well as covertly, we usually don’t so. In most of our conversations private speech is pushed out by and abandoned in favor of public speech. Thus, when we can only talk about what we hear overtly, we are bound to engage in NVB. If, on the other hand, we can talk about what we hear covertly, we are bound to have SVB and we will be listening better to each other overtly. Stated differently, we don’t and we can’t have SVB as long as what we say to ourselves covertly cannot be expressed overtly. Furthermore, overt hearing can be improved by covert hearing. That is, each time we turn our conversation to what we hear covertly, our overt hearing becomes better.

Another way of saying this is covert hearing includes overt hearing, but overt hearing excludes covert hearing. Everybody has heard the overt complaint that we should and could do a better job at listening to each other, that is, by overt hearing. However, this emphasis on overt hearing hasn’t changed our behavior, because it excluded covert hearing. 

The NVB speaker elicits overt hearing in the listener. When the speaker, with his or her sound, controls the listener behavior with an aversive contingency, the listener is prevented from covert hearing. When uni-directional overt ‘communication’ is demanded by the speaker, the listener is pretty much forced to disconnect from his or her own covert private speech. Although this covert disconnect causes many overt disruptions, we are conditioned by NVB to ignore and punish such effects. Indeed, we have learned to punish and blame ourselves. Thus, private speech is alienated from our public speech. 

By reversing the split between our private speech and public speech, we accomplish SVB. By moving away, while we speak, from overt hearing to covert hearing and by making overt what we covertly hear, we can finally overtly hear what we have been saying to ourselves covertly.

Skinner explained consciousness as “seeing that we are seeing” and called this “conscious seeing” (1963). I suggest that consciousness is 'hearing that we are listening." Like seeing, hearing is made possible by the operant contingencies of a verbal community, which conditions unconscious hearing responses as well as what we say about what we hear. Initially, what we hear elicits raw sensation, covert, unconscious hearing. From our verbal community we learn to listen, talk, write and read; we become conscious about what started out as an unconscious experience. Another way of referring to this is that we transition from nonverbal to verbal behavior. 

Since we are born as nonverbal organisms, our listening behavior develops first and forms the foundation from which we become verbal. To ‘hear that we are listening’ and to ‘hear consciously’ requires that we pay attention to our sound while we speak. Since we seldom do that and at best have only experienced this momentarily and accidentally, we are mostly unconscious while we are speaking. In most conversations speakers don’t pay attention to how they sound, but they demand that others to pay attention to them.

When we speak, we produce sound. Vocal behavior preceded vocal verbal behavior ontogenetically and phylogenetically. In other words, vocal behavior goes back a much longer time into our evolutionary history than our vocal verbal behavior. Our survival depended on hearing and responding to the vocalizations from our conspecifics. There was no need to be conscious about raw sensation vocal behavior, because it would instantly elicit the adaptive autonomic response. It should be apparent from this example that our neural behavior never produced our hearing response, but always was and still is that hearing response. This neurobiological fact is not changed by the arrival of language, due to which we became capable of describing our reflexive vocal response and became conscious of it. However, only to the extent that our descriptions are accurate can we become conscious communicators. Stated differently, only our inaccurate descriptions ignore the eliciting effects which are created by our raw sensation vocal behavior. 

Although we have been conditioned by inaccurate descriptions of our vocal verbal behavior, that is, by NVB, our bodies haven’t changed that much and  respond quite naturally to accurate descriptions. Obviously, such descriptions describe danger as dangerous and safety as safe. Danger is still felt by most of us as danger and safety is still felt by us as safe. Once we have the distinction correct between SVB and NVB, we recognize how much so-called communication is still NVB, because it is based on threat and intimidation. Only because we haven’t had ongoing SVB and because we keep having instances of NVB, we consider the description of consciousness and the neural basis for it, to be separate from consciousness itself.