April 17, 2015

April 17, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

When a person listens to him or herself while he or she speaks, he or she most probably does something that he or she usually doesn’t do. Most of us don’t listen to ourselves while we speak and have never done it. Our lack of self-observation or the fact that we act unconsciously, is a function of a way of interacting in which speakers don't listen to themselves while they speak. The reason for a person to listen to him or her self while he or she speaks, could be this writing or someone who instructs him or her. In other words, there has to be a stimulus to evoke that person’s overt behavior. Nothing is happening magically by itself. There is always a reason why behavior occurs. 

People are uncomfortable with radical behaviorism’s determinism, because they believe in a self, which supposedly miraculously and spontaneously causes their behavior. This view causes nothing but problems. However, the instruction ‘listen to yourself while you speak’ still has the word 'self' in it. Let’s break down this behavior in behavioral terminology. As we I stated, these words, which also can be spoken, are stimuli. The reader sees these stimuli with his or her eyes or hears them if they are spoken with his or her ears. When we leave out the unscientific, imaginary concept known as 'self', we begin to pay attention to how our environment affects our nervous system. When I say ‘our’ environment or ‘our’ nervous system, I am not advocating for an updated version of ‘our’ outdated 'self'. To the contrary, I am addressing what is the same for all of us; our bodies are affected by, interacting with and adjusting to our environments. Even what we call our reflexes have great variability. 

 

For instance, these words cannot be read in the dark. Our pupils adjust to the amount of light. Although they will reflexively respond when we go in or out of the cinema, our pupils become smaller when exposed to large amounts of light and bigger when exposed to small amounts of light. Only if the light reaches a certain threshold are we able to read these words. To produce the vision responses we call reading light stimuli must impinge on photo-receptors. Without these kind of light stimuli there can be no seeing, which makes reading possible. As we can see from this example, this has nothing to do with any one person in particular.

Going back to our example of listening to ourselves while we speak, we are talking about a person’s ability to hear his or her own sound, while he or she speaks. In the same way that a person can hear the sound of someone else, he or she can also hear his or her own sound. Remember, there is no 'self' is involved in the feedback loop by means of which an organism interacts with and adjusts to his or her environment. As stated in the example of light being the necessary condition for reading, the fact that something is visible is not sufficient for reading. In other words, the nonverbal raw sensation behavior of seeing can be shaped into reading behavior only when the light is turned on more often. Also, both nonverbal and verbal instructions must be given for reading behavior to be conditioned. A person, who listens to him or herself, while he or she speaks, can do so without reading. However, reading words like these can help a person to listen to him or herself. If these words are read out loud, a sound will be heard. Such hearing is nonverbal, regardless of what these words mean.

As we are usually not listening to ourselves and as no one has emphasized our need to be able to listen to ourselves, we engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) most of the time. Once we listen to ourselves, it becomes apparent that Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) only seemed to be impossible because we were not listening to ourselves. In SVB we produce different stimulus products than in NVB. In SVB the nonverbal stimulus products that are produced by the sound of our voice evoke verbal behavior reports about these stimulus products of the speaker. Under such circumstances the speaker will be aware of him or herself that he or she is speaking.

Although the response products, produced in SVB by the speaker can be heard by others, the speaker, as a public of one, is now aware of his or her own voice. Indeed, in SVB we become like a musician, whose hearing continues to be shaped by the quality of the sound which he or she is producing. Moreover, the improvement of our sound, which comes about by listening to ourselves while we speak, changes our neural behavior and results in what we ordinarily call ‘self-awareness’. Verbal descriptions which are functionally related to positive nonverbal experiences are different from the verbal descriptions which are functionally related to negative nonverbal experiences. When all the speakers in a consversation listen to themselves while they speak, it becomes clear that we have all had past-experiences of self-awareness, but we were unable to refine or continue these experiences. Listening to ourselves while we speak creates the contingency in which we achieve what Colwyn Trevarthen calls “communicative musicality” (2008).