May 6, 2015

May 6, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

When a listener identifies a speaker as someone who produces Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the listener discriminates the eliciting effects of the sound of the speaker’s voice, by expressing the events which happen within his or her own skin. In a very real sense, the listener nonverbally behaves the speaker, who has an immediate effect on the listener and who reacts to the aversively-sounding speaker with respondent behavior. Such respondent behavior is mediated by the listener’s sympathetic nervous system and is called the fight-flight-freeze response. 

According to Stephen Porgess's Poly Vagal Theory (2013), the fight-flight part of this response involves the mobilization of the listener, but the freeze part involves the immobilization of the listener. Since these are nonverbal implicit processes, listeners who listen to NVB speakers often run into problems, while trying to express verbally what they experience nonverbally. They express a mismatch between their verbal and nonverbal behavior, that is, as speakers, the listener is also stimulated to produce NVB. As long as this mismatch is not verbalized both the production and reinforcement of NVB continues.  

The listener will be able to discriminate Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) when he or she is capable of verbally expressing the nonverbal well-being that he or she is experiencing while listening to the speaker. Again, such a listener is directly responding to the sound of the speaker, which now immediately has a completely opposite effect as in NVB. The voice of the SVB-speaker instantly induces a parasympathetic autonomic response in the listener. Although there will also be some sympathetic activation, this serves to make the listener alert. 

Proper stimulation of the listener by the speaker results in the listener’s ability to effortlessly follow and understand what the speaker is saying. During SVB,  within the listener’s skin, no nonverbal aversive events occur, which distract the listener from what the speaker is saying. In other words, the voice of the SVB-speaker expresses and evokes in the listener the congruence between his or her nonverbal and verbal behavior. Also, when the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks, his or her listening and speaking behavior become joined, because they happen at the same rate and intensity level. SVB is an important behavioral cusp. Porgess's Poly Vagal Theory explains that Social Engagement, that is, talking and listening, can only occur in the absence of aversive stimulation.  

May 5, 2015

May 5, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

I woke up from a good night sleep, which ended with a dreadful dream. Bonnie my wife and I had come to an edge. There was an abyss and in the distance a mountain range. It seemed to me I needed to be on that mountain range and I was sure my little towel would fly me there, if I held it spread out in front of me. I demonstrated to Bonnie how to hold it, so that she could fly too, but I noticed she didn’t believe it was possible. It then dawned on me that if she would take the jump, I would witness seeing her crash to her death. I didn’t want that, of course, and all of a sudden I didn’t understand anymore how it had been possible that I had been thinking that I could fly across this abyss? It was impossible and although initially this seemed like a realistic plan, I had been woken up due to her fear and I called off the jump.

When we analyze this frightening dream with the certainty that comes from the knowledge that human beings behave their environments neurally - that is, due to conditioning, we acquire individually different verbal and visual concepts with which we navigate and construct our ‘reality’, which remains inaccessible to others - we find that this dream has something interesting to convey. 

Although the dream appeared to be about Bonnie’s fear of flying, it was, of course, about me. The fact that my neural behavior concatenated this dream is undeniable. I woke up from this dream in which I was looking with Bonnie at this deep abyss and across at the distant mountain range. I held a small towel in my hands and Bonnie held one in hers and according to me it was possible to use that towel to fly across. 

 

It is not so odd to think of a dream within a dream, when one realizes that one can only think about the dream after one has woken up. Interpretations of this dream are only possible following an ‘awareness’ of the dream, that is, after the chaining of covert, nonverbal, neural behaviors, we are aware of the dream, or rather, we believe when we verbally express this chain that we are aware of ‘it.’ It is not even so odd then to think of a dream within a dream within a dream, because the chaining of neural verbal and nonverbal behaviors makes this possible. There is truth to the 'esoteric' fact that our body knows.  

May 4, 2015

May 4, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

When the listener responds to the speaker’s voice, the listener is either responding to an appetitive or to an aversive stimulus, that is, the listener either likes or dislikes the speaker. However, the listener’s response is a neural behavior of which he or she is either capable or incapable. For instance, the listener must have a behavioral history with English language, to be able to understand an English speaker. If such a history is missing, the listener will be incapable of having appropriate responses to English speakers. The listener’s history of reinforcement conditioned his or her body to appropriately respond to English stimuli. Whatever the listener is capable of perceiving as appetitive or aversive is always determined by his or her history of reinforcement. 

     

The saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder is factual in that the construct of an appetitive or an aversive sounding speaker is made possible by the neural behavior of the listener, who mediates the speaker. The listener who  identifies a speaker as interesting or uninteresting, as appetitive or aversive, is capable because his or her body was conditioned to do so, that is, auditory stimuli were repeatedly reinforced as such. What may sound good to one, may sound bad to another. In other words, the listener neurally or non-verbally behaves the speaker and thus provides reinforcement. 

Other than in the eye of the beholder there is no beauty. Everything that is perceived as out there, in the external environment, is in fact happening within the skin of each organism, who is conditioned to do so. Since such behavioral processes happen to individual organisms, listeners, as an audience of one,  feel energized or drained by a speaker. In the former the listener experiences the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) of the speaker, but in the latter the listener experiences the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) of the speaker. Their body produces neural behaviors that make them attentive or inattentive. People describe their environment or others as something outside of themselves that is stimulating or tiring to them, but they don't realize that they refer to their body which has been conditioned by previous circumstances to increasingly respond stimuli in that manner. As long as they don’t listen to themselves while they speak, as they would in SVB, they don’t realize that they sound exactly like what they don’t want others to sound like and that the pot is calling the kettle black.The latter is an example of NVB.

May 3, 2015

May 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Behaviorologists, who insist that the science of human behavior is its own separate discipline because psychology can’t and doesn’t represent them, find themselves beating a dead horse each time they point out that most scientists continue to believe in “mini-deities” in spite of the fact that they acknowledge that “human beings are a product of natural processes.” The reason this keeps occurring is not because of some “cultural fog,” but because of how we talk.

In “What is Reality to an Organic Unit of Behavior” (2014) Lawrence Fraley beautifully analyzes this “I” or “me”, the entity which supposedly manages our body and its behavior from within. Although Fraley has written wonderful works about the “behavior-controlling relations” that maintain our ancient belief in our “personal internal agent”, he doesn’t say anything and doesn’t seem to realize that it is our way of talking about this “personal self-agent”, which maintains the fact that we keep on living “within the bubble of that fiction.” What keeps getting lost in the complex behavior of academic writing is a much more simple behavior, talking, has continued unabated. I say simple, because pretty much everybody can and must do it, even the most successful academic. 

A good example of this is the little heard off personal life of Albert Einstein. When his marriage with his first wife, due to extra marital affairs, was falling apart, he made a misogynistic list of demands presumably in an attempt to keep his family together. He basically insisted his wife would be a slave to him. Unless our interactions show this “mystical agential self” is no more asserted, people will continue to talk out of their asses. Einstein said “there must be something behind the energy” and he pandered, in spite of all his knowledge, to of “a superior spirit” and “a superior mind.” Skinner’s personal life, by contrast, holds up to scrutiny. Everything we know about him was proof he really lived what he knew. One could also detect this in the sound of his voice, when he spoke of “the operant.” From his vocal verbal behavior it was clear “the particular form of that occurring orderly response” was “determined by the current configuration of the responsively sensitive neural bodily structures”.

May 2, 2015

May 2, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M. S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

When I hear a nice song in a language I don’t understand, I feel inspired to write my own lyrics. I have been writing and singing beautiful songs lately. I realize how much I love singing. I like Brazilian and Hawaiian music and I use these melodies to write songs. I would like to be singing with a band and look forward to meeting other musicians, who can play the music I like to sing. 


As a verbal engineer I consider myself to be a natural scientist. I am not someone special, a celebrity or motivated by some higher purpose. Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the kind of vocal verbal behavior in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an appetitive contingency, isn’t possible as long as the speaker has any superstitious ideas.

Getting natural and becoming scientific about ourselves requires another way of talking. Our usual way of talking is Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency. Few people have the behavioral history that allows them to recognize that most talking is unscientific. Even scientists themselves don’t care at all about their way of talking. They may be scientific about their field, but they are as unscientific about vocal verbal behavior as anyone else. Although they are  sophisticated with words and academically approved with degrees, when it comes to talking, they are superstitious, held back, biased and insensitive. 

   

The majority of scientists continuous to believe in an inner self that causes them to behave the way they do. In other words, their education has failed to educate them to be able to talk in a different way. Although they may no longer believe in the supernatural, they have retained the fallacy of seeing themselves as the causal agents of their own actions and, most importantly, they sound like it. During instances of NVB in a verbal episode, the speaker dominates the attention of the listener. The NVB-stimulating speaker is reinforced by the NVB-stimulated listener, who, when he or she becomes the speaker, does the exact same. In NVB  the speaker struggles to retain and dominate the attention of the listener and the listener struggles to pay attention to the speaker. In NVB neither the speaker talks nor the listener listens, they both pretend.

Aversively-sounding scientists and teachers don't and can't teach well, as they don’t behave scientifically while they speak. They may be talking about the natural world, but they act as if they are separate from it. They have done a dismal job educating others about how behavior actually works. This is why most of mankind believes in non-existing entities and can’t solve any of their problems. And, this is also the reason we don’t have a scientific way of talking. 

SVB is a scientific way of talking. It is characterized by the ongoing well-being of both the speaker and the listener. During SVB the listener can effortlessly pay attention to the speaker as there is no aversive stimulation. When a verbal episode contains more SVB than NVB instances the results of such interaction show that no autonomous agent is causing this, but only our way of talking. 

  

Although scientist may agree that the natural world is determined, they have many problems applying this notion to others, specifically to themselves. The most pervasive cultural influence preventing scientific solutions to mankind’s problems determines that scientists talk like everybody else and produce mainly NVB. They have been conditioned to dominate, exploit, manipulate, coerce, alienate, distract, compartmentalize and dissociate, while they speak. 

Nothing keeps our belief in a behavior-controlling inner agent in place like NVB. Unless scientists lead the way with SVB things cannot and will not change. Regardless of many scientific discoveries, nothing has changed in how we interact with each other, because we keep referring to “I”, to “me” or to “you”, without realizing what we are talking about. Neither one of these exist.

A behaviorist account of who we are as individual organisms boils down to our neural and neuromuscular behavior. Neural behavior or thinking is not viewed by most of us as merely another kind of behavior that is determined by behavior-controlling environmental variables. This is not because it is so objectionable or difficult to understand, it is because of how we talk with each other or, rather, it is because of our lack of conversation. Indeed, we are not in the circumstances that would condition us to think otherwise. The assumption that papers, which are read by only a few specialized experts, would be able to change the vocal verbal behaviors of others is ludicrous. Emphasis on written instead of spoken words has prevented and continues to prevent learning.