October 3, 2015

October 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This writing is my seventh response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). The following statement characterizes the author’s bias toward visual stimuli. “At the behavioral level, the neural activity underlying

the response is invisible to the reinforcing environment.” Like other behaviorists, they have been ‘looking’ for variables in the environment. However, observable variables don’t stimulate them to ‘look’ for the auditory variables that might be involved. When it comes to auditory  variables there is nothing to ‘look’ for. They are easier to detect when one closes one’s eyes. While temporarily depriving oneself from visual stimuli, one is bound to become more alert to auditory stimuli. 

There is nothing new about this ancient practice, which ‘sheds light’ onto private-speech-receded public speech, that is, to what one is saying to one self. Many so-called meditators have attempted in vain to ‘observe’ what they were thinking or feeling, but for them too, it was  visual bias which prevented them from listening to and tracing back the  environmental variables that are in the maintenance of these covert phenomena. Before this writer became a behaviorist, he was intensely involved in such ‘meditative’ activities. He became frustrated with his attempts to achieve silence by trying to ‘observe’ what he at that time still believed to be his ‘mind.’ Because of growing up in a family with six children in which there was a lot of talking and screaming and because he had been studying classical music for many years as a tenor-singer, he had been strongly attracted to singing and speaking. The latter had often gotten him in a lot of trouble.

Not many meditators are interested in talking about meditation. The so-called meditation always seemed to be over as soon as the talking began again. I could not keep my mouth shut because I was convinced it should be possible to talk meditatively. Since no one was interested in exploring this possibility with me, I began to talk out loud by myself. As I felt rejected and hurt I discovered SVB by listening to my sound while I speak. Most behaviorists, like these superstitious meditators, believe that they have found the Holy Grail: observable environmental stimuli which cause the response. Similarly to these spiritualists, most behaviorists (even Skinner himself) are not exploring auditory stimuli which are causing their own verbal behavior as they were conditioned to pay attention to visual stimuli. Consequently, in day-to-day speech, they are more focused on what they say then on how they are saying it. 

To pay close attention to how we sound while we speak requires a focus on our own voice. This focus can only be made if what we are saying is no longer ‘dominating’ how we are saying it. The situation in which we are stimulated to listen to ourselves while we speak has to be one in which we don’t have to be overly careful about what we are saying. Stated differently, only when we are feeling safe, accepted, acknowledged, supported and positively reinforced, only in the absence of aversive stimulation, will we be speakers who are not coercing, exploiting, manipulating, draining, distracting and dysregulating the listener. What we are saying also becomes coherent in SVB; how we are saying it makes this happen. Another way of putting this is in SVB nonverbal and verbal expressions are aligned as the speaker experiences him or herself as the listener. The speaker’s nonverbal auditory stimuli, his or her voice, control his or her verbal behavior. 

Although, like neural stimuli, auditory stimuli are invisible, they can be listened to. Moreover, listening to auditory stimuli is not as complicated as observing neural stimuli; it doesn’t involve any other measurement instruments than our ears. As a matter of fact, listening to ourselves is the easiest thing to do. It is effortless and without any tension. We have all done it if circumstances permitted it and we are all familiar with it. At the level of our vocal verbal behavior we have all spoken at one time with a voice which was reinforcing to us. 

The big deal about ‘finding our own voice’ is in direct proportion to the extent that we were prevented that from having it. Everything that stressed, threatened, forced, angered and frustrated us has prevented us from producing what we would happily call ‘our true sound’. In other words, our ‘real voice’ always expresses our relaxation and well-being. When we talk with that voice in SVB we are conscious that we are using that voice.

When we have NVB, on the other hand, we don’t know that our voice is an aversive stimulus that induces negative affect in the listener, who is also the speaker him or herself. However, the listener knows and if the speaker becomes the listener of his or her own voice while he or she speaks, he or she will know this too and experience SVB. 

Indeed, when NVB stops, SVB begins and when SVB stops NVB begins. These two ways of talking are mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed to each other. In SVB the speaker is conscious of his or her speech as the  focus on his or her sound, which is produced and listened to here/now, will make and keep the speaker conscious. In NVB, however, the speaker is mechanical and unconscious as he or she doesn’t listen to his or her sound while he or she speaks. The NVB speaker only becomes conscious of him or herself again during SVB, when he or she finds that he or she was ‘on automatic pilot’ and not listening to him or herself.