July 2, 2015

July 2, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my third response to “What do animal signals mean?” by Rendall, Owren & Ryan (2009). The authors give some great examples of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) in primates.  They state “Lower-ranking victims of aggression seldom offer much serious physical resistance, but they can make themselves unappealing targets by screaming vociferously, producing loud, jarring bursts of broadband noise and piercing, high-frequency, tonal sounds in variable strengths who aversive qualities are difficult for listeners to resist or habituate to.” 

Humans too produce danger-deflecting noises while they talk. Those who, due to their status, can coerce others, often don’t need to sound aversive, but will hold it against anyone if they raise their voice. The relative calmness of someone’s voice doesn’t necessarily produce SVB. The listener who listens to the boss who always forces his or her way, knows his or her calmness is deceptive, because if he or she doesn’t do what he or she is expected to or doesn’t agree with what the boss says, he or she risks being fired. Also, the bosses’ calm tone doesn’t evoke a safe feeling in the listener and the subdued tone of voice of someone who is being bossed around maintains NVB.  

Since NVB is more common than SVB, we habituate to NVB faster than to SVB. This is different with primates, where the rate of NVB is low compared to humans. Most interactions among primates get everyone what they need. This cannot be said about the way in which humans communicate. We are so used to and are so often surrounded by aversive voices of NVB that we don’t even notice. We don’t protest as we don't know how to change it. Although NVB is threatening, intimidating and causing only problems, we think it is normal. We only find out how abnormal NVB is when we finally have some SVB. Usually, however, even if the circumstances make it possible, we don’t believe we can prolong it, let alone behaviorally engineer it.  

  

Instead of exchanging information, the described alarm calls signify a “behavioral context" that epitomizes the "push and pull of social conflict.” NVB bears “the mark of design for influence and manipulation with features well-suited to access and exploit listener’s basic perceptual sensitivities and central nervous system reflexes.” In SVB, there is no conflict at all, no manipulation, no exploitation and no coercion.  Moreover, in SVB both speakers and listeners experience positive emotions.

Furthermore, the authors comment that the informational approach doesn’t work for sexual selection. There are no frogs, fish, birds or insects “sending out signals about their male qualities”. They don’t “encode quality information in their signals” and females don’t “extract this information to make mating decisions.”  Such “metaphorical and abstract” ways of thinking makes the mentalists lose sight of the obvious: “The most basic requirement for any signal is that it be detectable against back ground noise.” 


Nowadays we use technology to drown out “back ground noise” to constantly promote ourselves and to outdo our competitors. In NVB, we want others to listen to us, but we are not listening to ourselves. In NVB, other-listening is more important than self-listening. Focus on other-listening excludes self-listening, but focus on self-listening includes other-listening. 


The more we want others to listen to us, the less we listen to ourselves. However, others weren’t listening to us. As long as SVB had not been realized they couldn’t. Although many felt that others weren’t listening, this didn’t lead to the discovery of SVB, to the contrary, it only led to an increase of NVB. It could only lead to discovery of SVB if self-listening somehow became more important than other-listening. People have gone insane over this, as it goes against everything we know. 

The opposite of what was just described is also true: the more we listen to ourselves, the less we want to listen to others, that is, the less we want to be involved in NVB. It is better to have SVB on our own than to have NVB with others. To learn more about SVB, one has to withdraw from NVB, but one can only do that if one recognizes it. Although SVB ideally is learned from others, these others are often unavailable and our only realistic option to learn SVB is by ourselves and to share it as much as possible when others are available. SVB can only be taught by someone who has explored it on his or her own. 

We all know SVB a little bit, because we have been in talking situations which were friendly, supportive and congenial, but there was never enough continuity and stability to prolong our fleeting moments of SVB, so that we could recognize the great  difference between SVB and NVB. Once we are faced with that experience, we will choose SVB over NVB every time, but we can’t choose SVB if this contrast was never apparent to us. It took many years of accumulating and analyzing SVB instances to make these conclusions possible.  I gradually became better at achieving SVB and avoiding NVB. In the beginning, I wanted to have SVB so very badly as I was having it so very little. 

The signaling of non-humans is important in sexual selection. For instance, if the sender’s courtship signals of birds are not detected by the female receivers, no mate can be attracted, that is, if the female cannot locate the male, who is producing the kind of elaborate song that will make her choose him, no genes will be passed on. “Importantly, the process of simply detecting and localizing the signals can by themselves play an important role in modulating female mating behavior.” Since only behaviors which lead to creation of offspring are adaptive, it is important to recognize phylogenetically caused behaviors in humans. “Direct effects of courtship signals on female receptivity and mating behavior are well-known in birds, which produce some the most structurally complex and variable sounds in the animal world.” Human beings also attract each other with songs or with how they sound while they speak. 


These animal examples bring us the evolutionary significance of listening. Whether sound is detected is of a matter of survival. A baby can only attract the attention from the mother by crying and young penguins in a colony of many others are only recognizable by their sound.  Humans are lost during NVB as they neither have the ability to localize each other, nor do they even know how to localize themselves. Sadly, during NVB we all become disembodied communicators.

While localizing and attracting others may be essential for sexual selection, in human interaction localizing and being our ‘self’ rather than striving to be our ‘self’, is very important. We can only be our ‘self’ if we have SVB, that is, if we as speakers affect each other with voices, which are perceived by listeners as appetitive stimuli. Among these listeners is the speaker-as-own-listener, whose voice resonates his or her ‘being’. In other words, ‘self’ is just ‘being’ at peace. I am reminded of Skinner, who wrote, I paraphrase, that who we are is just a location at which variables converge. Let me look that up and locate a nice quote to support my point. How do I do that? I type "Skinner" and add “there is no self.” In my Google search I behave verbally, just like him.  In “About Behaviorism” (1974) Skinner says that a ‘self’ or ‘personality’ is “a locus, a point at which many genetic and environmental conditions come together in a joint effect.” 


It is only when we listen to our sound while we speak, that we can be conscious and sensitive about how we actually effect the listener. The ‘self’ is also beautifully described by Skinner as the “speaker-as-own-listener.” In NVB, we not only lose touch with each other, but we lose touch with ‘ourselves’, with the "speaker-as-own-listener."


"The important function of structurally complex song appears simply to preclude perceiver boredom or habituation.” If in many nonhumans “Analogous anti-habituation effects have been shown at the molecular, cellular and neural levels as well” this indicates how vital the stimulating effects of human vocalizations must be. The nightingale doesn’t sing its beautiful song because it is stressed, anxious, frustrated or sad. In a similar fashion, in SVB, speakers are calm and peaceful and this is when our voice resonates at its optimum. It isn’t a matter of believing it, but of trying it out. During SVB we never get bored listening to each other, because each speaker is already his or her own listener. In NVB, on the other hand, we are bored, dull and insensitive and, consequently, relationships are so problematic and aversive that we want to escape from them and we become more and more isolated. 

The informational approach to courtship signals argues that “they must be honest to be functional.” This anthropomorphic  view overlooks the long-established fact that “perceivers have evolved sensory systems to detect, localize and discriminate important features of the environment; and that they must perform these functions in many contexts, not just in the service of mate choice.” Since there is phylogenetic continuity, humans can learn from non-humans that they have inherited by birth the ability to discriminate between SVB and NVB signals.