May 13, 2015

May 13, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Once we have increased experience with the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) it will become apparent that focus on current contingencies is more effective than our familiar efforts to figure out and piece together the previous contingencies of which our current behavior might be a function. When speakers focus on their sound while they speak this emphasizes the moment in which their sound is produced and listened to. Speaking and listening behaviors mutually enhance each other when they happen at the same rate and intensity level. This is the case in SVB, but in NVB there is either a higher rate of speaking or a higher rate of listening. A higher rate of speaking occurs as a function of a lower rate of listening. Conversely, a higher rate of listening is a function of a lower rate of speaking. In the latter, this causes conflicts in a person’s private speech, but in the former the conflicts will occur mostly in the person’s public speech.

Whatever the assumptions about our interactions with others may be, these  assumptions are much easier to be dissolved on our own than while being engaged in a conversation with others. The reason for this is that we listen differently to ourselves then to others. However, we would like others to listen to ourselves in the same way that we listen to ourselves. Those who listen more to themselves than others, want others to listen to them in a manner that they may not even be capable of. On the other hand, those who hardly listen to themselves at all want others to listen to them in a similar superficial way. They dislike it when others listen to them in a more thorough manner then they are capable of. It is easy for us to see on our own why we go overboard with too much talking or too much listening; when others are absent it is easier to synchronize and join our speaking and listening behaviors, so that we can experience and explore SVB undisturbed and become less concerned with fulfilling the expectations of others. If alone we find we produce a lot of NVB, we tend to feel strange about producing SVB, but if we produce mostly SVB, we feel awkward about producing NVB. However, the new distinction between SVB and NVB makes these positive and negative phenomena acceptable.

Once we know more about the distinction between SVB and NVB and have a sense of the proportion of SVB and NVB experiences in our lives, we usually find we have more NVB than SVB experiences. I have never met anyone who with more SVB experiences than NVB experiences. The astounding fact that this ratio is so skewed towards NVB indicates that we interpret our experiences in the light of the behavior which has most momentum: NVB. Because of conditioning we feel responsible for causing our own behavior, although in fact a chain of functionally related events resulted in this anxious, but fictitious, internal behavioral manager. Reinterpretation of our lives in the light of SVB is a comforting experience. It takes time and happens in a step by step fashion.  

It is often said in NVB, that it is easy to see the ‘fault’ in others and not in ourselves. In SVB it becomes clear that it is only necessary for us to see the ‘fault’ in ourselves. Moreover, our so-called ‘fault’ turns out to be a fiction that was maintained by NVB. Those who experimented with SVB find that they are okay the way they are. SVB is a way of talking which reinforces the well-being of the speaker and the listener. Superstitious beliefs in a self is a function of NVB, which is based on negative emotions. Being strategic, refers to a non-existing inner behavior-manager. Anything predetermined, being political, but also being consistent or standing by our words implies NVB. 

This is the most difficult thing to understand is that SVB cannot be understood, but it must be experienced: SVB is a new way of speaking. The chain of functionally related events giving momentum to SVB creates a different order than the chain of functionally related events resulting in the perpetuation of NVB. Once we refer to the distinction between SVB and NVB, it is impossible to maintain our long-standing belief in an inner behavior-causing self, let alone in a higher power. Because they speak NVB, most scientists still don’t see anything wrong with having science and religion as an explanatory system. This changes once SVB is experienced. With SVB it is clear we can’t have it both ways, religion and science are incompatible. We either have SVB or we have NVB, that is, we are either really talking about the natural world or we are coercing and dominating each other, although we may use science, religion, politics, education and parenting as our excuse.

Scientist must continue to be taught about physics, biology and chemistry etc., but they must also be taught about SVB, as NVB makes them biased. As long as they are incapable of talking about their topic in a SVB fashion, they have an inner agent-agenda, which contradicts the natural philosophy of science. The change in verbal behavior, which occurs as they learn about SVB, is a matter of proper scientific contingency-management. Scientists should be the first ones to learn about SVB, as it is unacceptable that one moment verbal behavior is under control of natural contingencies, while next moment they cater to non-existent inner agents or supernatural entities. 

As stated, SVB is a new way of speaking. The content of a lecture can be the same and yet the lecture can still be new. The newness of what we say does not depend on the words we use, but on how we sound. In NVB, we sound the same, which is another way of saying that we are not really alive, but in SVB, our voice is alive and what we say is enhanced by how we say it. However, this happens without any effort, naturally, because the speaker in SVB is totally at ease with him or herself. The negative emotion that is always involved in NVB creates a tone of voice which distracts from what is being said, because it elicits in the listener counter control in the form of negative private speech.

Quality control of scientific practice should begin to focus on how scientists talk. Only in SVB can the natural philosophy of science be embraced and be properly continued, but in NVB scientific practice goes out the door. The most important independent variable which is functionally related to the outcome of our interactions is how we sound while we speak. Control over this specific variable is necessary to be able to discuss functional relations. When there is no attention for how we sound while we speak, when the speaker is not, or at least, imagines he or she is not, his or her own listener, then such a speaker will have private speech which is caused by NVB public speech. When the speaker and the listener are not experienced as one, by the scientist him or herself, his or her verbal repertoire is not controlled by the natural philosophy of science. Moreover, NVB impairs our ability to think, because it drives a wedge between public speech and private speech, which in turn maintains the false notion of an inner self, which then seems to be causing our behavior.

May 8, 2015

May 8, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Our ability as speakers to produce higher rates of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is determined by the extent to which our environments support that we listen to ourselves while we speak. Aversive environments give rise to high rates of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which prevent speakers from listening to themselves while they speak. Threatening situations are not conducive to SVB, as they trigger autonomic responses, fight, flight or freeze responses that make social engagement impossible. SVB will only occur in appetitive-stimulating environments. There is no question as to whether it will occur or not. If it doesn’t occur, there are aversive stimuli which are preventing SVB.

SVB teaches us that there is no difference between the environment which is within our own skin and environment which is outside of our skin, that is, SVB is rooted in naturalism, which considers all problems amendable through the methods of empirical science. Stated differently, SVB is neither based on presumed supernatural or spiritual laws nor is it based on cultural artifacts, which endow individuals with superstitious beliefs in an autonomous self or agent, which functions essentially like a mini-deity. SVB can be verified and replicated because it is based on the philosophy that only natural laws and forces operate in the world. The distinction between the world within and outside of ourselves is considered unscientific and is maintained by NVB. 

Although we have become scientific about many things, we have remained trapped by NVB, because we are unscientific about how we talk. Ironically, NVB demonstrates that we are almost constantly in conflict with each other, because we all view, what we consider to be, the external environment, in our own way. There is an explanation for that and its called conditioning. Our bodies behave the way they do, that is, we act the way we do, and, we also think, feel, see, believe, talk and hypothesize the way we do, because our behavior is reinforced. It goes against our beliefs, our conditioning, that we are not responsible for our behavior and that the mentally ill, criminals or drug addicts, therefore, like us, behave the way they do because their behavior is reinforced. No behavior can ever occur un-caused, magically, miraculously.

Thus, although many of us have known that SVB is possible, we could not continue with it as long as we thought that we caused it and, consequently, mankind drags on with its NVB. Supposedly, we need to pray, meditate or become conscious or nonviolent, but all spiritual practices and methods of self-improvement could never provide us with the scientific account of how we actually talk. It is not accidental that we have remained so unscientific about how the speaker affects the listener: all our power structures depend on the continuation of NVB. Stated differently, SVB will create a new order.

We have yet to establish the conversation in which we open up each other to discuss the tremendously beneficial effects of SVB. When you engage in SVB for the first time, you experience this is something you have always known and wanted, but were unable to maintain or recreate.  Those who have explored SVB scientifically have acknowledged that SVB is the spoken version of of what has until now only been written. Moreover, they recognize that the absence of scientific vocal verbal behavior has led to an overemphasis and reliance on scientific textual verbal behavior, which has led to the devaluation of talking. Scientists argue that written language is considered to be more important than spoken language, because of its greater accuracy, but upon discovering SVB they are amazed and surprised that they agree that vocal verbal behavior can produce greater accuracy than their writing.  

It is easy to understand we speak English or Russian, because we have been conditioned to do so. We were reinforced for our English or Russian verbal behavior by our English or Russian verbal community. In the case of language, it is obvious that unless an individual is in the situation in which he or she is conditioned to speak, write and read, he or she remains illiterate. Literacy refers to how a person’s neural behavior, his or her body, due to conditioning, was changed. You can say to someone in your native language “I have pain in my stomach”, because your body changed after you became literate. Not only did you become capable of speaking about what you feel in your body, your ability to speak made you conscious that you have a body and, that who you are is merely one of the constructs in the language which you speak. 

The point of this whole explanation is that you are aware of what is inside of your skin as well as what is outside of your skin, because of language, which, as we just discussed, was made possible due to changes within your own skin. Regardless of whether you talk about what you experience in your body (e.g. stomach pain) or your environment (e.g. thunderstorm), you are only capable of doing this because of your language, which, in the process of learning how to speak, read and write, involved the conditioning, that is, the alterations of the neural behavior of your body. Another way of saying this we verbally and non-verbally behave our environment, which is within as well as outside of our skin. When we refer to the neural behavior which makes this verbal behavior possible, we should say that we behave non-verbally our verbal behavior. 

This is why the distinction between SVB and NVB is important, because in SVB there is congruence between the nonverbal and the verbal, while in NVB there is a difference between how we say it and what we say. Another aspect of this is that in NVB a person’s covert private speech is excluded from overt public speech, while in SVB covert private speech can become overt in public speech. Although private speech is a function of public speech, in NVB, in which private speech is thrown out of public speech, speakers are unconscious, that is, they speak in a mechanical fashion. It becomes very obvious that positive self-talk is a natural and inevitable consequence of SVB and negative self-talk is always a consequence of NVB. Once we have understood the effects of SVB and NVB, it is self-evident that SVB makes us and keeps us conscious, while NVB makes us and keeps us unconscious.

It is no exaggeration to say we are unconscious because of how we talk. A different way of talking makes us conscious. Moreover, we realize that being conscious, rather than becoming more silent, as many supposedly enlightened people makes us believe, requires us to engage in ongoing conversation with each other. Furthermore, consciousness is embodied vocal verbal behavior, SVB, which will only be possible, whenever threat or aversive stimulation, and NVB is absent. Stated differently, we only experience ourselves as one with our environment, as long as our body experiences a sense of well-being. Due to the aversive influences which are both maintained and increased by NVB, our neural behavior is conditioned to remain in a perpetual sense of fear, anxiety and stress, but SVB reliably reverses this dehumanizing process.

May 7, 2015

May 7, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

My reason for teaching Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is because it has the potential to transform human relationship. I am confident we can solve all our problems and achieve a better way of life. SVB improves how we talk with each other. I speak of teaching, because SVB can be taught and learned. To my knowledge nobody is teaching it. The reason that nobody is teaching it is because nobody knows enough about it to be able to teach it. However, people are trying to learn it on their own without having anyone to teach them. They know it is possible, but they can’t continue it as they don’t know how to. Due to my personal circumstances, I was not only motivated to continue, but upon discovering Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism, I found out about how it actually works. SVB is a scientific account of our vocal verbal behavior. 

It has taken me years to come to terms with my lack of understanding and my inability to accept the undeniable fact that I have discovered something entirely new, which no one else has discovered. If others discovered and understood the far-reaching implications of SVB, they too would have been compelled to teach it. However, the reality is that SVB isn’t taught by anyone, anywhere!

I am not saying that we don’t know about it at all, but the little we know about it is simply not enough to be able to continue with it. Although we achieve it in moments, we can’t continue SVB, the vocal verbal behavior in which the voice of the speaker has an appetitive effect on the listener, as we are unfamiliar with what happens when we shift from SVB to Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

Unless we know how SVB and NVB work, we will not be able to increase SVB and decrease of NVB. Although behaviorists, in their writings, acknowledge the well-documented scientific fact that we don’t cause our own behavior, they too don’t know how to create, let alone continue SVB, which would allow them to instruct and demonstrate during actual conversation, that our speaking and listening behaviors a caused by existing traceable environmental variables. However, these nonverbal independent variables, called stimuli, which set the stage for how we talk, exist primarily within our own skin. 

When we say that someone’s voice sounds like “music to our ears” or “makes our blood boil” we refer to experiences that are taking place inside of the body of the listener, which can only mediate what is outside the skin of the listener,  because of how that body was conditioned by past experiences.

How is one to differentiate between SVB and NVB if one seldom hears the former and mainly the latter? In most of our conversations, speakers control the behavior of the listener with an aversive-sounding voice. The speaker and the listener have been conditioned mainly by NVB, the vocal verbal behavior that is characterized by hierarchical differences, in which our speaking and our listening are predetermined. Although NVB is based on the continuation of our negative emotions and the exploitation of our positive emotions, we accept it as our normal way of talking. Granting that some of us have been conditioned by more SVB than others, the fact remains that most of us have been mainly exposed to and conditioned by NVB and are more inclined to reinforce NVB. 

  

Conditioning processes are lawful. The probability of behaviors which are reinforced increases, while the probability of behaviors that are punished decreases. In operant conditioning the event after the response changes the future probability of that response. SVB and NVB are two subclasses of vocal verbal behavior, which increase due to reinforcement or decrease due to  punishment. SVB or NVB have nothing to do with being right or wrong. Stimuli presented by speakers, inadvertently affect the body of the listener, some of whom become speakers, but most of whom let others do the talking. 

In NVB the behavior of listeners is under control of strict rules. Listeners are expected to listen to the teacher, parent, preacher, politician, leader or the authority. In SVB, by contrast, there is fluid turn-taking between the speaker and the listener. In SVB, at any given time, a listener becomes a speaker and a speaker becomes a listener. Moreover, in SVB the speaker is his or her own listener. The listener listens to the speaker in the same way as he or she would when he or she would listen to him or herself while he or she speaks. Likewise, also the speaker listens to him or herself in the same way as he or she would, when he or she would listen to someone else. In SVB there are no hierarchical differences between the speaker and the listener. SVB can only happen in the absence of aversive stimulation. Many SVB instances are needed to recover from the conditioning effects of NVB, our problem behavior.  Only appetitive vocal verbal behavior is capable of reconditioning our nervous system. 

Let it be said in a straightforward fashion: no matter what we believe, know or assume, most of our common way of talking concerns the subset of vocal verbal behavior classified as NVB. However, nobody produces this problem behavior because he or she likes like to, wants to or chooses to. We behave the way we do because of how we are affected by others, who condition our behavior. It is not our choice to behave this or that way. As long as we think it is our choice, we will create NVB and make SVB impossible. We are either involved in SVB or in NVB as our neural behavior was stimulated and shaped by our previous environments, that is, by certain people. Although we may believe otherwise, we are tremendously burdened by the fact that we are so often involved in arguing, fighting, dominating, coercing, pretending, struggling, humiliating, defending, posturing, distracting, manipulating and agitating, while we speak. Yet, the distinction between SVB and NVB can only begin to become clear to us if we are start to listen to ourselves while we speak.

I claim that even the most stressed out person; the psychotic; someone who is depressed or suicidal; someone who is manic; someone who is morning the loss of a loved one; someone who was abandoned; someone who has been neglected and rejected; someone who was falsely accused; someone who was tortured; someone who was misunderstood and not validated; someone who was sexually and physically abused and enslaved; someone who is suffering from the traumatic experiences of war; someone who was betrayed; someone who was discriminated; someone who was imprisoned; and someone who was addicted, will find relief by simply listening to themselves while they speak. 


When two people listen to themselves while they speak they will know that they have SVB. They will experience and express what is real. However, we need to talk in order to be able to hear ourselves. We need to talk and be unconcerned about what we say, so that we can pay attention to how we sound. When we do that, experiences which made no sense to us will begin to make sense to us again. Our sound nonverbally expresses the conditioning we have endured, survived and suffered. We need to hear the sound of our pain, our sadness, our loss, our confusion, our rage, our hate and our loneliness. 


We must first listen to Voice # I, the sound of our NVB. Only then can we begin to acknowledge that when we don’t speak with Voice # I, we speak with Voice # II, the voice of SVB, the voice of hope, health, love, support, peace, safety, stability, sensitivity, togetherness, strength, grace, creativity and gratitude.

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.