July 1, 2015

July 1, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

(Just so you know, I am in the process of posting my journal writings on my blog. That is why it is no up to date.  By the way, you can google these papers I am referring to).

This writing is my second response to “What do animal signals mean?” by Rendall, Owren & Ryan (2009). The statement by Cheney & Seyfarth (1996) that “mental mechanisms underlying the vocalization of nonhuman primates…appear to be fundamentally different than those that underlie human speech” presumes that nonhuman and human primates have “mental mechanisms.” This fictitious, but widespread concept has made it impossible to acknowledge that human conversation is often not real. In Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), neither the speaker really speaks nor the listener really listens.  In NVB, the speaker pretends to be speaking and the listener pretends to be listening and since most people are not aware of the great difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and NVB, they accept it, just like people once accepted the earth was flat and the center of the universe. Similarly, we still accept nonsensical “mental mechanisms” although we already know there are no words, there are only neurons with axons, dendrites, synapses and neurotransmitters in our brains. Firing neurons cannot tell us why we talk the way we do. Only environmental stimuli explain why SVB or NVB, why different brain activity occurs.

Behaviorism is inevitable. This is most obvious in research on nonverbal primates where inadequate verbiage stands out even more than in human communication. SVB and NVB have not been identified because, as we all know, in human speech people can endlessly beat around the bush. However, this is not the case with autistic children, and, not surprisingly, this is where behaviorism gains most of its credibility. Eventually, however, all our lousy and intellectually lazy mentalist constructs give way to a realistic behavioral account.  It is illustrative to read  how non-behaviorist animal researchers keep on changing their constructs. “Efforts to establish the meaning and referential quality of primate signals” are currently happening “under the banner” of “functional reference.” The effort mentalists put into maintaining their outdated way of talking by stretching the concept of language is absolutely laughable. Instead of adopting a genuine behaviorist view, they justify their ridiculous way of talking by saying “the motivation for this terminological change was to make clear that nonhuman animal calls are not exactly like human words, but rather appear to function in the same way.” If words really function in the same way as animal calls then they are not really all that different.  

These authors beautifully expose the mentalist bias which at any cost continues to “rely on the notion that signals have independent meaning, and are, like human words, ‘about’ things, even when signalers do not intend to transmit the information they are encoding” (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1996). If these researchers, instead of responding to each other’s work in writing, would actually talk together about these matters, it would soon become apparent that mentalists have more NVB than  behaviorists. The misinformation that is spread by the mentalist account perpetuates our NVB. Although behaviorists of course also have high rates of NVB, they are more inclined towards SVB as their theoretical perspective explains and stimulates it.

The authors correctly call the idea of “functional reference” an “oxymoron”, but this will not change the mentalist’s way of talking.  One can imagine the argument that happens when one person tells the other person that he or she is wrong, while the other thinks that he or she is right. We are all familiar with such conversations which can never go anywhere, because it is NVB. 

The change from NVB to SVB is as much needed for mentalists as behaviorists.  The concept of “functional reference” is like McDonald’s, who sells hamburgers and milkshakes with the slogan “I’m loving it”, that is, by putting words into people's  mouths. As in NVB the behavior of the speaker is presumably  more important than the behavior of the listener, “functional reference” seems to imply “that the information conveyed simply allows the receivers to infer the context of signal production.“ 

This dualistic going back and forth between the ends of some imaginary continuum is another characterization of NVB. If  speakers and listeners are construed as existing at the ends of the continuum, it would preclude the speaker-as-own-listener.  Naturally, in NVB the speaker doesn’t listen to him or herself while he or she speaks.  This happens only during SVB, in which the two behaviors are joined as they occur at the same rate. 

When “either distinction between the end points evaporates” the speaker is the listener and the listener is the speaker. The fact that these mentalist animal researchers, against all logic, continue to hang on to their “conceptual and empirical ambiguities” proves that their NVB overemphasizes the behavior of the speaker.  Indeed, the “placement of a signal on the continuum thus comes to depend less on its purported information content and more on whether one adopts the signaler’s or perceiver’s perspective.” A speaker can only adopt the perceiver’s perspective to the extent that he or she perceives him or herself, that is, to the extent that he or she listens to him or herself as he or she speaks.  Moreover, the SVB speaker is used to turn-taking in which he or she becomes the listener and someone else can then become the speaker.  

In NVB there is an absence of turn-taking, which means that one person usually does all the talking, while the other person only listens and then does what he or she is told to do. Such hierarchical communication is similar to communication of nonhuman primates. Separate treatment of signalers and receivers in nonhuman primates is foremost a consequence of human NVB, but also, of evolution, which puts our nose on the “distinct roles in the communication process” of “senders and perceivers”, “including often divergent interests”.   

To identify NVB and SVB, we must maintain an evolutionary natural perspective. “In this view, the function of signaling is to influence the behavior of perceivers rather than metaphorically transmit meaningful, language-like information.” The SVB/NVB distinction is equally applicable to nonhuman primates as it emphasizes “the role of signal structure in effecting such influence” and expands “the concept of communication well beyond just representational-like exchanges.” 

Everyone who experienced SVB agrees that NVB is superficial, because in it we fixate on what we are saying at the expense of how we are saying it.  NVB speakers are upsetting to listen to. It wouldn’t be adaptive if “alarm vocalizations produced upon encountering dangerous predators” weren’t “short” and “abrupt” and “noisy.” 

 

“Brainstem regions regulating whole body arousal and activation” are involved in the elicitation of “the listener’s immediate orienting response and movements preparatory to flight.” With NVB social engagement is impossible due to activation of lower brain regions. What Stephen Porges (2001) calls immobilization (freeze) response and mobilization (fight or flight) response is a “highly conserved response system” that is “traceable to detection and localization functions related to predator avoidance and prey capture in in early vertebrates (Grothe, 2003). 

Primates don’t react to what alarm calls mean and that is why we need a non-informational account which “looks at more concrete explanations grounded in the influence that specific acoustic properties have on broadly conserved neural, sensory, affective and learning systems in listeners that together help to support adaptive behavioral responding.” In NVB our voices often “have sharp onsets, dramatic frequency and amplitude fluctuations and chaotic spectral structures, which are exactly the sort of features that have direct impact on animal nervous systems.” Moreover, “such sounds are common in infants and juveniles, who otherwise have little influence on the behavior of older and larger animals.” Our high rates of NVB can be explained by saying that we are developmentally stuck. In NVB, we keep demanding each other's attention like children.  

When the speaker in NVB demands the attention of the listener it takes a lot of energy and effort to listen to such a speaker. “A frustrated primate weanling cannot force its mother to nurse, but can readily elicit such behavior with sounds whose acoustic features trigger the mother’s attentional mechanisms, increase her arousal state, and with repetition become very aversive.” We don’t look at it this way, but whenever we try to coerce each other with our NVB way of speaking, we behave in a similar fashion. 

In SVB, by contrast, the speaker’s sound gives, creates and maintains attention and is easy to listen to. Consequently, what is said is understood better, quicker and without any effort. The voice of the NVB speaker has been described as stabbing, grabbing, punching, pulling, choking and draining, but the voice of the SVB speaker has been described as soothing, uplifting, space-creating, validating, supporting and energizing. 

The authors are on the right track to discover NVB when they state “Adults can be similarly impotent when interacting with more dominant individuals. “ They describe the nonverbal version of NVB. Moreover, these kind of “squeaks, shrieks and screams” are “a class of vocalizations produced by many primates but also by many other mammals, bird and crocodilians.”