October 2, 2016

October 2, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

On YouTube you can see videos on which I explain and explore Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). There you will be presented with the visual and the auditory stimuli which make clear to you what I mean by the SVB/NVB distinction. We are way too obsessed with visual stimuli to pay attention to auditory stimuli.

The distinction between SVB and NVB can only be made clear if we focus on auditory stimuli instead of visual stimuli, such as in reading this writing. Familiarity with written words is to our disadvantage as insistence on printed explanations prevents us from having tangible experiences that make us understand the necessity of this distinction.

We have been involved in many conversations and we have observed how others talk, but we could not discriminate the difference between SVB and NVB as someone would always say that other topics were more important. The lawful relations of our spoken communication are easily obscured because we are used to and conditioned by high rates of NVB.  

What we believed was causing our behavior turned out to be not true once find out about SVB/NVB distinction. Upon contacting SVB we are often shocked and ashamed to find out how wrong our assumptions about our communication actually are. All of this needs to be overcome.

Oddly enough once we know about the SVB/NVB distinction our spoken communication turns out to be much less complex than we believed it to be. No great technical or intellectual skills are needed to be acquired to be able to engage in SVB, which is an effortless phenomenon. The difference between SVB and NVB is: NVB is effortful and SVB is not.

If we listen to someone’s personal history, we can recognize instances of SVB and NVB in their narrative. During good times SVB happens at a high response rate, but during bad times NVB happens at high response rate. Everyone recognizes the experiences involved in good time or bad times, but we are often not aware this results into two ways of talking.

As our narrative is about positive or negative experiences, we generally don’t recognize the role that our talking and listening play in eliciting or evoking these experiences in others. It is easy to understand that certain levels of SVB and NVB characterize the customs and habits about what is believed to be right or wrong within a particular culture.

We cannot communicate effectively with people who are different from our own culture to the extent that we were unable to discover the uniformity of how we talk. Moreover, these uniformities must be made explicit. As long as the SVB/NVB distinction was missing from our conversation, we weren’t able to address our cultural differences.

When we assign SVB/NVB ratios to each verbal episode, we will realize that regularities occur in different populations which are comparable to languages. Within each language there are actually two languages: SVB and NVB. These determine how this language is being used.

NVB is always used by the superior speaker to coerce and oppress the inferior listener, who will have to remain obediently assigned to his or her role in the social hierarchy. SVB, however, is based on equality between the speaker and the listener and is used by the speaker to reinforce and emancipate the listener into becoming a SVB speaker.

SVB speakers create speakers of a SVB quality and demonstrate that in NVB only a few speakers do all the talking. Only non-hierarchical speaking or SVB is a scientific way of talking as it facilitates the necessary feedback and turn-taking for investigation and verification. In NVB, the mechanical speaker demands: my way or the high way.