April 18, 2015

April 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Mankind’s problems are caused by how we talk. Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) simply means that we are talking with each other, but in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) we don’t know we are merely pretending to be talking. We are all part of the problem as long as we are not part of the solution. The problem is NVB and the solution is SVB. In SVB, we agree we have SVB, but in NVB we can’t even agree that we have NVB. In NVB the speaker is dismissive and inconsiderate about his or her effect on the listener. 

The reason why in NVB the speaker is not attuned with the listener is threefold: 1) The NVB speaker is unconscious about his or her sound, that is, the raw sensation hearing response of the speaker’s sound is not chained with hearing-awareness responses. Although the speaker’s tone of voice can be moderated, he or she continues to produce NVB as his or her emphasis is on what he or she is saying. Thus, in NVB the speaker ‘fixates on words’. 2) As a result of the inaccurate, agential verbal descriptions that prevent correspondence between verbal and nonverbal expression, the NVB speaker verbally separates from the raw sensation hearing responses, which he or she unconsciously, non-verbally experiences. In other words, the NVB speaker is involved in a struggle between what and how he or she says something. It may take many forms, but ultimately the NVB speaker always struggles for the attention of the listener. 3) As the NVB speaker is not listening to him or herself, it is more difficult for the the listener to mediate the speaker. He or she is not allowed to express the aversive effects of being the means to the speaker’s end. In NVB the listener is expected to be attuned to the speaker. This unconscious, mechanical, hierarchical, forceful, unsophisticated process involves outward orientation of the speaker and the listener, which establishes and guarantees the speaker’s dominance. In other words, in NVB, listening to others and making others listen to us, is more considered to be important than listening to ourselves. As the speaker is presumably more important than the listener, all the communicators in NVB remain outward-oriented. 

 

I have observed and verified together with thousands of individuals from all walks of life, for more than 30 years, thousands of times, that these three habits: 1) fixation on words, 2) struggle for attention and 3) outward orientation, change the way we sound. Only in SVB we talk with our natural sound. I have also discovered radical behaviorism, which validates SVB and NVB. Without his environmental science of verbal behavior, we will never be able to address and overcome our gigantic communication problems. 

SVB is the Holy Grail of human interaction. I am hopeful about the many who have already come to know about. As time goes by more and more people will learn to discriminate between SVB and NVB. I have successfully taught it and people have learned it. They too can teach it and implement it. We need to recondition our neural structure. Our current physiology, which mostly mediates NVB, can and will be changed by SVB. As a result of SVB we will acquire new covert and overt behavior. Moreover, we will be able to take note of this while we talk and acknowledge that “current stimuli evoke and that current neural structures mediate” (Ledoux, 2014, p. 483). SVB becomes possible when spoken communication is identified as our dependent variable and the sound of our own voice is the independent variable.

Individuals who have experimented with SVB find out they already know, due to their history of conditioning, there is a great difference between SVB and NVB. Those who didn’t want to experiment were not inclined to it as they were lacking the necessary history of conditioning. Only those who, due to their already high rates of SVB can recognize the great difference between SVB and NVB. They already know and they can teach those who, due to their high rates of NVB are incapable of acknowledging this major difference. Thus, only those with the appropriate behavioral history of reinforcement are capable of producing by how they speak the refined neural behavior in others which is needed for recognizing the stimulus indications of the human voice.

One cannot recognize the stimulus implications of someone else’s voice as long as one remains unaware of one’s own voice. Misunderstandings result from our lack of ‘self’-listening, that is, from the speaker’s inability or rather his or her unfamiliarity with the possibility of listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. Awareness of our own sound while we speak requires embodied covert hearing behavior, which evokes our body’s mediation of a covert observing response. However, such embodied covert hearing behavior is only possible in the absence of aversive stimulation. In other words, we only embody our sound when we feel completely safe and at ease. Unfortunately, this is seldom deliberately achieved while we speak and that is why most of our conversations perpetuate NVB. As long as the speaker’s covert observing response, which identifies whether one’s own voice is aversive or automatically reinforcing, only leads to a covert response and not to an overt response, the NVB speaker will inadvertently continue with his or her NVB. However, when  the speaker's covert observing response can be expressed overtly, he or she will produce SVB. Thus, only in SVB the speaker is a conscious speaker.