Language Enlightenment

Saturday, July 16, 2016

March 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

While writing this writer is talking with himself sub-vocally. He doesn’t say anything. If a video was made of him, one would only see him sitting on his chair with his laptop on his knees. Nothing of his verbal behavior could be heard. One would only hear the sound of his keyboard. The words he is thinking are a neural behavior only available to him. He feels great he is no longer talking out loud with himself and is writing like this and enjoying himself. It is like a miracle which happens in total silence.

People often told him about the great difference they experience between what they say when they think out loud and what they think without saying it. This writer is thinking without saying it, but since he is typing thoughts, he is experiencing a similar epiphany as when a person is for the first time thinking out loud and really listening to him or herself. The listening this writer is doing is different because there is nothing to hear. In fact it cannot be called listening. He is reading what he writes and discovering what he is going to write, while he is writing.

His pace of writing is much slower than his pace of his speaking. He likes to slow down and is not bothered if it takes time for the words to appear. He is more patient as a writer than as a speaker. He never thought about this and he is delighted by this discovery. It is easier for him to follow his thoughts while he writes than when he speaks. When he speaks there is an immediacy which is lacking when he writes and reads. A year ago, he would have never thought he would experience his writing as a more laid back activity than his own speaking. A shift in his verbal behavior has occurred.

This writer is at ease while writing and reading these words. He has created this situation in which this writing is replacing his speaking and this reading is replacing his listening. He is moving into a new realm, the realm of the printed word. For a long time reading and writing had been uncomfortable to him. Recently, reading has become more accessible to him due to his writing. While writing this, he notices his mouth would still like to make movements to speak these words, but he doesn’t let that happen. He doesn’t keep his lips shut, but he senses that his lips are touching each other in a peaceful manner. The feeling generated by that smile is felt throughout his body and is refreshing.

When one reads a written text, one’ s eyes must follow the words that form the sentences as one tries to understand, but when one, like this writer, is writing one’s own text, there are no words to be followed as they have not yet appeared. To read one's own written words, one is waiting for words to appear and only then can one read. It seems this writer is writing and reading these words at the same time. Indeed, his writing and reading behavior are happening at the same rate. This can also happen while he speaks, when his speaking and listening are joined. When speaking and listening happen at the same rate, Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) occurs.

Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) occurs when speaking and listening happen at different rates. The words “Sound” and “Noxious” describe the quality of our sound during vocal verbal behavior. During any given verbal episode, the sound of our voice changes from moment to moment and gives rise to instances of SVB and NVB. A pleasant and an unpleasant conversation is determined by how we sound. The more instances of NVB, the less we enjoy, the more instances of SVB, the more we enjoy our conversation.

When writing and reading behavior happen at the same rate, a written version of SVB is created. Such texts are very easy to read. Likewise, in SVB as vocal verbal behavior, speakers are easy to listen to. In NVB, by contrast, the speaker’s voice is an aversive stimulus and difficult to listen to. In NVB texts, the reader is having difficulty understanding the writer. A text that was written by a writer whose writing wasn’t joined with his reading verbal behavior, is difficult to understand. It is easy to read and understand when a writer’s writing and reading are in total synchronicity.

Since most of our conversations unfortunately have a higher rate of NVB than SVB instances, most of our writings show a similar pattern too. It is no accident that since most of our conversations are difficult to follow, that most of what is written is difficult to read. This can and should be noticed and changed. Noticing the high rate of NVB in a written text is easier to spot than noticing it during spoken communication. When a text is too difficult for us to read, we simply don’t want to read it. Likewise, when conversation is difficult to understand, we also just don’t want to hear it. When the NVB verbalizer’s speaking happens at a higher rate than his or her listening, the mediator’s speaking must happen at a lower rate than his or her listening, so that he or she can understand him or her. Speaking and listening is always effortful during NVB. Likewise, writing NVB texts is as difficult as reading NVB.

It is easier to refuse to read a text then to refuse to listen or speak with each other. If a text is too difficult, we put is away, we don’t want to read, because we don’t understand it. However, if a conversation is too difficult for us, we often can’t refuse it. To avoid the immediate bad consequences, we fake that we understand each other. Reading, writing, texting, tweeting and social networking have appeal, because they relief us from the immediacy of our social constraints.

During SVB, the written and the spoken verbal behavior of the verbalizer and the mediator keep getting better and better over time. In other words, there is constant improvement, adjustment and refinement. Even when something isn’t clear, this is addressed and cleared up. In NVB, on the other hand, the verbal behavior of the speaker and the listener as well as the writer and the reader gets worse over time. Another way of viewing this negative and problematic process is that, comparatively speaking, we discriminate more and more instances of NVB.

SVB and NVB are functionally equivalent. In both response classes people get their needs met, but the means by which this happens are different. In NVB, the relationship gets more and more strained, often leading to a crisis or breakup, but in SVB, the relationship improves. SVB is definitely more advanced than NVB, which is basically our caveman mentality. Only in SVB can we be more precise, accurate and complex, but due to our NVB, we become more crude, dissociated and insensitive. Lifelong consequences of verbal behavior are best observed in old people. Old folks who have had more SVB are healthier, more social and active in their old age, but those who mainly had NVB, become more rigid, isolated, frustrated and angry.

We give all sorts of medical names to these aging-phenomena, but we are often unknowingly talking about the long-term effects of NVB. This writer once worked in a geriatric home and noticed that even in old age people continued to terrorize each other, as they had done throughout their lives. When he facilitated conversational social groups, those who had been used to more SVB responded with joy and appreciation, but often they had to be constantly protected from the meanness of those who were more NVB-inclined. Especially apparent in that context was the contrast between the repetitiveness of NVB and the spontaneity of SVB. Those with SVB are simply more alive, but those with more NVB are dying.

March 20, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

Today’s writing is the second response to “Analyzing Verbal Behavior Under the Control of Private Events” by Willard Day (1976). This writer noticed he is interested in papers about behaviorism that were written around the 70s. He was at that time in his 20s and all he could think of was to travel and see and experience the world. The papers by Day resonate, because he speaks in plain words and gives simple examples.

Day states “Feelings can exercise a discriminative controlling relation with [vocal verbal] behavior, as when pains of a headache can set the occasion for my saying to someone “I have a headache”, or can lead me to get a bottle of aspirin” (words added). He writes “Covert talking can function easily as the antecedent controlling term in a behavioral contingency.” Day agreed with Skinner “that one of the important characteristics of verbal behavior, presumably including covert verbal behavior, is its capacity to be reinforced by its effect upon the speaker himself.” An example of this is would be when one praises oneself for not getting upset in a situation in which one previously got upset. Here, one’s positive private speech has a regulating effect on one’s public speech. A third point is “how naturally images enter as controlling variables into contingencies of reinforcement.” Day gives an example of his participation in an exercise of “increased self-awareness” and “personal growth”, but, as a behaviorist, he finds “it was perfectly apparent to me that the having of images functioned in a very straightforward fashion much as any other reinforcer in providing differential reinforcement which enabled me to shape up satisfactory covert moves in "altering my consciousness," as they say, so that the rate of emission of symbolically significant images was increased.”

This writer is reminded of a guided-fantasy he once participated in. With others he was lying on the floor with his eyes closed. The person leading the guided fantasy was telling a story about travelling to the mountains to visit a guru. When the place where the guru lived had finally been reached, it turned out he wasn’t there. His cave was vacated. It was dark, but one could see a small box standing on a flat rock. Participants were told to carefully approach the box, pick it up and bring it out into the light. While seated on a ledge, overlooking the mountains, one was to open the box to see what was in it. Each participant found something different in their box. This writer saw a root, others saw a diamond ring, a letter or picture. Supposedly, there was spiritual significance to each of these. This writer, however, recently celebrated his birthday and someone had given him a box of ginseng. It seemed explainable why he had found a ginseng root in that box. The symbolic meaning of this finding was clear to him: each time, before taking one of the little bags to make ginseng tea, he had looked at the beautiful golden ginseng package, which had a ginseng root printed on it. He had a dream in which he became enlightened and had fantasized this tea would help him on his path to self-realization.

The guided-fantasy took place before this writer knew anything about behaviorism. Eastern spirituality, as behavior-controlling contingencies, determined his behavior in his 20s and 30s. It is good to revisit these pre-scientific experiences and put them in perspective, because, they laid the foundation for the conceptualization and understanding of SVB and NVB. If it wasn’t for the fact that this writer had practiced meditation, he would not have paid such close attention to his private speech. Instead, as most people do, he would have mainly been involved in public speech. His meditative behavior, which continued to be reinforced by more happy and peaceful experiences, paved the way for a form of talking with himself in which he felt no pressure, negativity, stress or struggle. Although such blissful conversation is possible others, it is not dependent on them. This is where SVB and NVB differ. In the latter, all the communicators make demands, because they depend on each other. In NVB people are yanking each other’s chain and getting under each other's skin, because they cannot leave each other alone. In SVB, by contrast, people can be alone, because they experience the verbalizer and mediator within themselves.

Forty years ago Willard Day wrote “I have said earlier in these remarks that the talking I would be doing would be obviously under the control of private events in some sense. We are not in a professional situation at this time to say precisely what that sense is, yet the control is clearly in a certain degree different from the immediate environmental control exercised over the verbal descriptions we make in reporting direct observations. It is a mistake to regard anything which is not the report of direct observation or the experimental test of an hypothesis as simply speculation, with respect to which something further must be done.” This writer agrees with Day that talking about private events is “tacting”.

Once we can tact SVB and NVB, we can create the professional situation in which we can “say precisely” in what sense our overt verbal behavior is controlled by our covert verbal behavior. SVB and NVB are “simple tacts” which “generally involve external environmental antecedent control” and “are generated under a kind of pseudo-audience control of an environmental setting in which the discriminative responding involved in tacting is appropriate.”

Day wasn’t aware of the SVB/NVB distinction, but his writings show that

he was very close. For example, he writes “I trust that it is not at all clear what I mean by "pseudo-audience control." That is because it refers to a category or class of antecedent controlling relations which it is now a part of my behavioral repertoire to be able to discriminate, or to respond differentially to, and yet which is not set apart as a special subset of antecedent controlling relations in Skinner's book Verbal Behavior.”

Obviously, Day had a history of self-reflective, meditative behavior. The above is a succinct behavioristic formulation of what agential cognitivists have called “insight”. This writer hears Day’s call and s able to answer him. “What I am calling for is explicit and systematic effort on the part of the professional community to increase the refinement, sophistication, and subtlety of our capacities for discriminative responding that we can bring to bear on our assessment, or specification, of the variables involved in behavioral control. Clearly this effort should be empirically oriented” (italics added). Such empirical work is done by this writer.

“Ongoing verbal behavior that is emitted under environmental circumstances with which one is relatively familiar” seems to refer to NVB, our common way of communicating. We all know what it is like to be dominated, pushed around, coerced, humiliated, punished, exploited, manipulated, violated, stressed, intimidated, used, drained, ignored, misinterpreted, rejected, ridiculed, oppressed and disrespected. We also all know, at least a little bit, what it is like to have SVB and be understood, respected, listened to, validated, reciprocated, supported, reinforced, accepted, energized and loved. “Group analysis” of the subsets SVB and NVB will reliably lead to “increasingly more subtle discriminations.”

March 19, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is the first response to “Analyzing Verbal Behavior Under the Control of Private Events” by Willard Day (1976). Reason for this response is the promotion of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). SVB is vocal verbal behavior in which the verbalizer positively reinforces the mediator. SVB public speech results into SVB private speech, commonly known as positive self-talk. With Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the opposite is true. In NVB the verbalizer controls the mediator’s behavior with a negative contingency. This always leads to NVB private speech or negative self-talk.

This writer read a book by Willard Day and recalls that he was one of the few behaviorists who seemed really interested in vocal verbal behavior, in spoken communication. Day quotes Skinner, who in “About Behaviorism” (1978) talks about the special character of verbal behavior, “because it is reinforced in its effect on people – at first other people, but eventually, the speaker himself. As a result, it is free of the spatial, temporal and mechanical relations which prevail between operant behavior and nonsocial consequences...[An] important consequence is that the speaker also becomes a listener and may richly reinforce his own behavior” (pp. 88-90).

Private events resulting from SVB and NVB public speech are different. Consequently, our SVB private speech comes to control our SVB public speech and our NVB private speech comes to control our NVB public speech. Our vocal verbal behavior is always preceded by our sub-vocal behavior that belongs to the same subset. Our NVB private speech can never control our SVB public speech and our SVB private speech will never control our NVB public speech. Knowing this can solve a lot of problems.

March 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader,

This writer, who is a psychology instructor, gives his students the task to write a paper, which starts with the sentence “When I listen to the sound of my voice while I speak then..” In this paper students write about what happens when they pay attention to how they sound while they talk. The responses have been phenomenal. Each paper is a testimonial to the validity of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the vocal verbal behavior in which the verbalizer produces a sound which positively reinforces the mediator.

The two-page long papers from his students make clear how important it is for the verbalizer to recognize that the verbalizer and the mediator can be just one person. This writer just finished reading a great paper written by a female student, who described feeling self-conscious about how she sounds. She is often anxious around people who sound hateful and can’t seem to understand them very well, even if she tries. And, when she says something, which according to her was wrong, she continues to ruminate and obsess about it for hours. It is apparent from her writing that she is very hard on herself and is often trying to change herself.

After summing up her insecurities about her communication with others, she states, she is nevertheless content with the way her voice sounds while she speaks. Moreover, she thinks that is the most important thing. On the one hand, listening to herself while she speaks makes her overly self-aware, but on the other, after talking for a while, she is completely at ease with it. Due to her writing, which represents her way of talking with herself, she is able to notice that in spite of her doubts, she is okay with herself. She predicts and strongly believes that the more she likes her own voice while she speaks, the more positive things will happen to her.

These written reports are remarkably consistent. Many students write about the same thing. Listening to the sound of their voice while they speak makes them aware of how they were and are affected by previous and current environments. The differences between these environments are often depicted by what they sound like ‘in their head’ and ‘in their body’. Given the fact that they are writing this paper for extra credit, students feel reinforced for listening to themselves and recognize that listening to one self was never taught and often also not even possible.

A male student writes that when he listens to the sound of his voice, he immediately loses track of what he is saying or what he is supposed to say and, consequently, he experiences confusion. All he can think of when, because of this writing exercise, he feels his voice in his body, is a sense of anxiety about growing up. He describes the deepening of his voice as he got older as a dreadful fear for what was to come. However, while writing and talking with himself, he gets passed his anxiety aboutthe unknown and suddenly feels grounded in how he sounds, in the now. He discovers the possibility of talking with himself and says “the sound of my voice is me, nothing but me” and “there is no better feeling than talking to yourself.”

He realizes, that other than talking in his head, he didn’t get to talk with himself that much. He notices “I am always performing a task while I am talking with himself in my head”, but now he gives himself permission not to do that. Instead, he talks about his favorite things, so that he doesn’t have to think about what he says so much. This is totally new for him. First it was strange “like a puzzle getting jumbled around my head”, but then he began to listen to and answer the questions he had for himself. He said “It then began to feel like a tool that can unlock any problem that man has.”

It is common for those who listen to their voice while they speak for the first time to initially have confusing or chaotic feelings about it. These are the messages that were given to us while we were growing up. Moreover, these effects occurred within the first few years of our nonverbal lives. They became the basis upon which we developed our verbal language skills. Many of us were overwhelmed by too much language too soon, involved in learning to perform tasks. Skinner recognized this instructional aspect as central to verbal behavior (1957) development. The failure to learn how to perform a nonverbal task correctly is more often than people are willing to admit a direct consequence of faulty verbal instruction. This is especially the case when, due to stress or frustration, different or contradicting messages are send by the verbalizer verbally and nonverbally.

The disorientation involved in the process of listening to our voice while we speak was less severe for the female student. It only brought up a sense of being overly self-conscious. However, for the male student there was a greater impact, which tells us about the lack of support he must have experienced as a child. More facts about our different behavioral histories become available with more interaction, that is, with more SVB. These facts cannot be communicated in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which verbalizers aversively control the verbal behavior of the mediator.

As babies we express ourselves without words. Until we learn how to speak, we are nonverbal verbalizers. As we were initially only capable of mediating the sounds that we grew up with, how we will sound later on, very much resembles the stimuli experienced in our earliest environment. A different situation determines a different experience of our sound and involves a change of our sound. When this different situation occurs, as when these students are writing this paper, they notice the difference.