October 31, 2016

October 31, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my sixth response to “The Power of the Word May Reside in the Power of Affect” (2007) by Jaak Panksepp. Language learning starts when we are nonverbal children. We only become verbal to the extent that nonverbal learning, which preceded verbal learning, was based on positive emotions. Negative emotions are the basis for learning in the school of coercive behavioral control. This school needs to be closed.

I am interested in positive behavioral control as it is more effective, creative and intelligent than forceful behavioral control. “Animals communicate with sounds, probably most affectively, but with more subtlety than typically imagined.” What is “typically imagined” is based on our Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Panksepp is not your typical communicator. He has a lot of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB).

Only someone with a high rate of SVB would notice that “Proto-musical competence precedes language in human mind development.” It takes a knowledgeable, sensitive and musical person like Panksepp to recognize that “Music is the “language” of emotions and its affective power arises from subcortical emotional systems.” He wants to inform the readers that “music and language capacities are tightly coupled overlapping processes of the brain” and he is already convinced that “evolutionary human communicative urges may be linked to affective-musical motivations that guide emerging social-cognitive abilities.”

Like me, Panksepp thinks outside the behaviorism-denying “cognitive box of the language instinct.” I love this emotional and philosophical man for asserting that “language arose from our emotional nature through a musical-prosodic bridge.” This bridge which is the basis of human language is more needed than ever before. We will only be able to cross this bridge if we listen to our own voice while we speak. We can bring music into our conversation by paying to attention to how we sound.