October 26, 2016

October 26, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

Today I respond to “The Power of the Word May Reside in the Power of Affect” (2007) by Jaak Panksepp. I am grateful to this researcher who once responded very positively to me in an email. His friendly advice was to “keep tilting the soil of affective neuroscience.” I have read many of his papers and also his book “Affective Neuroscience”.

In this paper Panksepp agrees with Shanahan’s “emotion-based view of the evolutionary and developmental basis of language acquisition.” Of course, he mentions Shanahan’s views to support his own perspective. I write about Panksepp’s work to illustrate the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

Panksepp states something unusual for a neuroscientist: “The transition from non-linguistic creatures to linguistic ones may have required the conjunction of social-affective brain mechanisms, morphological changes in the articulatory apparatus, an abundance of cross-modal cortical processing ability, and the initial urge to communicate in coordinate and prosodic gestural and vocal ways, which may have been more poetic and musical than current propositional language.”

Only SVB, which is mutually reinforcing, is based on this “initial urge to communicate”, but NVB is language that is without poetry and music. I appreciate this great neuroscientist and psychologist and I know that he suffered a great deal from the lack of recognition for his work.

Panksepp states “There may be no language instinct that is independent of the evolutionary pre-adaptations.” Panksepp, Shanahan and I argue against is the dominant “cognitive view of language”, which is based on “neocortically-based language modules” that are in denial of “primary-process emotional systems and the affective states they engender.”