May 4, 2015

May 4, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

When the listener responds to the speaker’s voice, the listener is either responding to an appetitive or to an aversive stimulus, that is, the listener either likes or dislikes the speaker. However, the listener’s response is a neural behavior of which he or she is either capable or incapable. For instance, the listener must have a behavioral history with English language, to be able to understand an English speaker. If such a history is missing, the listener will be incapable of having appropriate responses to English speakers. The listener’s history of reinforcement conditioned his or her body to appropriately respond to English stimuli. Whatever the listener is capable of perceiving as appetitive or aversive is always determined by his or her history of reinforcement. 

     

The saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder is factual in that the construct of an appetitive or an aversive sounding speaker is made possible by the neural behavior of the listener, who mediates the speaker. The listener who  identifies a speaker as interesting or uninteresting, as appetitive or aversive, is capable because his or her body was conditioned to do so, that is, auditory stimuli were repeatedly reinforced as such. What may sound good to one, may sound bad to another. In other words, the listener neurally or non-verbally behaves the speaker and thus provides reinforcement. 

Other than in the eye of the beholder there is no beauty. Everything that is perceived as out there, in the external environment, is in fact happening within the skin of each organism, who is conditioned to do so. Since such behavioral processes happen to individual organisms, listeners, as an audience of one,  feel energized or drained by a speaker. In the former the listener experiences the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) of the speaker, but in the latter the listener experiences the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) of the speaker. Their body produces neural behaviors that make them attentive or inattentive. People describe their environment or others as something outside of themselves that is stimulating or tiring to them, but they don't realize that they refer to their body which has been conditioned by previous circumstances to increasingly respond stimuli in that manner. As long as they don’t listen to themselves while they speak, as they would in SVB, they don’t realize that they sound exactly like what they don’t want others to sound like and that the pot is calling the kettle black.The latter is an example of NVB.