November 5, 2016

November 5, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my final response to “The Power of the Word May Reside in the Power of Affect” (2007) by Jaak Panksepp. As you can read, my dear reader, this is another paper which I have read which brings a ton of evidence for the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Many, many academics are trying to point out the same thing, but are coming at it from a different angle.

As a behaviorist, I don’t think that additional empirical exploration of the primary processes, which were already carefully investigated by Jaak Panksepp, will be able to dispel the “non-affective cognitivistic thought.” What urgently needs to be identified and stopped is what maintains this thought: our malicious Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

It was of course never “our cognitive preconceptions” which “have historically confused and shielded the way toward an evolutionary understanding of language and the associated heights of the human mind,” but it was our way of talking, which was considered to be of a lesser importance than our writings that made us verbally fixated.

Rather than academically arguing about “evolutionary understanding of language” or “the heights of the human mind”, we need Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) to have healthy harmonious relationships. High rates of NVB signify the breakdown of relationship. “It will be most interesting to see how the epigenetic emergence of language cortex is programmed by our social-emotional encounters, especially those playful secure bases within which mothers coax their children to become affective resonant creatures of culture.” Panksepp indicates safe environments.

Panksepp describes SVB: “to do that well, it was essential for recent brain developments to have retained an implicit understanding, that it is important to speak about the emotional complexities of our lives – the more poetically and musically, the better.”  Our “musical-emotional nature” stimulates SVB, but what loud-mouth morons like Steven Pinker have dismissively described as “cultural cheesecake” only perpetuates NVB.