July 2, 2015

July 2, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my third response to “What do animal signals mean?” by Rendall, Owren & Ryan (2009). The authors give some great examples of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) in primates.  They state “Lower-ranking victims of aggression seldom offer much serious physical resistance, but they can make themselves unappealing targets by screaming vociferously, producing loud, jarring bursts of broadband noise and piercing, high-frequency, tonal sounds in variable strengths who aversive qualities are difficult for listeners to resist or habituate to.” 

Humans too produce danger-deflecting noises while they talk. Those who, due to their status, can coerce others, often don’t need to sound aversive, but will hold it against anyone if they raise their voice. The relative calmness of someone’s voice doesn’t necessarily produce SVB. The listener who listens to the boss who always forces his or her way, knows his or her calmness is deceptive, because if he or she doesn’t do what he or she is expected to or doesn’t agree with what the boss says, he or she risks being fired. Also, the bosses’ calm tone doesn’t evoke a safe feeling in the listener and the subdued tone of voice of someone who is being bossed around maintains NVB.  

Since NVB is more common than SVB, we habituate to NVB faster than to SVB. This is different with primates, where the rate of NVB is low compared to humans. Most interactions among primates get everyone what they need. This cannot be said about the way in which humans communicate. We are so used to and are so often surrounded by aversive voices of NVB that we don’t even notice. We don’t protest as we don't know how to change it. Although NVB is threatening, intimidating and causing only problems, we think it is normal. We only find out how abnormal NVB is when we finally have some SVB. Usually, however, even if the circumstances make it possible, we don’t believe we can prolong it, let alone behaviorally engineer it.  

  

Instead of exchanging information, the described alarm calls signify a “behavioral context" that epitomizes the "push and pull of social conflict.” NVB bears “the mark of design for influence and manipulation with features well-suited to access and exploit listener’s basic perceptual sensitivities and central nervous system reflexes.” In SVB, there is no conflict at all, no manipulation, no exploitation and no coercion.  Moreover, in SVB both speakers and listeners experience positive emotions.

Furthermore, the authors comment that the informational approach doesn’t work for sexual selection. There are no frogs, fish, birds or insects “sending out signals about their male qualities”. They don’t “encode quality information in their signals” and females don’t “extract this information to make mating decisions.”  Such “metaphorical and abstract” ways of thinking makes the mentalists lose sight of the obvious: “The most basic requirement for any signal is that it be detectable against back ground noise.” 


Nowadays we use technology to drown out “back ground noise” to constantly promote ourselves and to outdo our competitors. In NVB, we want others to listen to us, but we are not listening to ourselves. In NVB, other-listening is more important than self-listening. Focus on other-listening excludes self-listening, but focus on self-listening includes other-listening. 


The more we want others to listen to us, the less we listen to ourselves. However, others weren’t listening to us. As long as SVB had not been realized they couldn’t. Although many felt that others weren’t listening, this didn’t lead to the discovery of SVB, to the contrary, it only led to an increase of NVB. It could only lead to discovery of SVB if self-listening somehow became more important than other-listening. People have gone insane over this, as it goes against everything we know. 

The opposite of what was just described is also true: the more we listen to ourselves, the less we want to listen to others, that is, the less we want to be involved in NVB. It is better to have SVB on our own than to have NVB with others. To learn more about SVB, one has to withdraw from NVB, but one can only do that if one recognizes it. Although SVB ideally is learned from others, these others are often unavailable and our only realistic option to learn SVB is by ourselves and to share it as much as possible when others are available. SVB can only be taught by someone who has explored it on his or her own. 

We all know SVB a little bit, because we have been in talking situations which were friendly, supportive and congenial, but there was never enough continuity and stability to prolong our fleeting moments of SVB, so that we could recognize the great  difference between SVB and NVB. Once we are faced with that experience, we will choose SVB over NVB every time, but we can’t choose SVB if this contrast was never apparent to us. It took many years of accumulating and analyzing SVB instances to make these conclusions possible.  I gradually became better at achieving SVB and avoiding NVB. In the beginning, I wanted to have SVB so very badly as I was having it so very little. 

The signaling of non-humans is important in sexual selection. For instance, if the sender’s courtship signals of birds are not detected by the female receivers, no mate can be attracted, that is, if the female cannot locate the male, who is producing the kind of elaborate song that will make her choose him, no genes will be passed on. “Importantly, the process of simply detecting and localizing the signals can by themselves play an important role in modulating female mating behavior.” Since only behaviors which lead to creation of offspring are adaptive, it is important to recognize phylogenetically caused behaviors in humans. “Direct effects of courtship signals on female receptivity and mating behavior are well-known in birds, which produce some the most structurally complex and variable sounds in the animal world.” Human beings also attract each other with songs or with how they sound while they speak. 


These animal examples bring us the evolutionary significance of listening. Whether sound is detected is of a matter of survival. A baby can only attract the attention from the mother by crying and young penguins in a colony of many others are only recognizable by their sound.  Humans are lost during NVB as they neither have the ability to localize each other, nor do they even know how to localize themselves. Sadly, during NVB we all become disembodied communicators.

While localizing and attracting others may be essential for sexual selection, in human interaction localizing and being our ‘self’ rather than striving to be our ‘self’, is very important. We can only be our ‘self’ if we have SVB, that is, if we as speakers affect each other with voices, which are perceived by listeners as appetitive stimuli. Among these listeners is the speaker-as-own-listener, whose voice resonates his or her ‘being’. In other words, ‘self’ is just ‘being’ at peace. I am reminded of Skinner, who wrote, I paraphrase, that who we are is just a location at which variables converge. Let me look that up and locate a nice quote to support my point. How do I do that? I type "Skinner" and add “there is no self.” In my Google search I behave verbally, just like him.  In “About Behaviorism” (1974) Skinner says that a ‘self’ or ‘personality’ is “a locus, a point at which many genetic and environmental conditions come together in a joint effect.” 


It is only when we listen to our sound while we speak, that we can be conscious and sensitive about how we actually effect the listener. The ‘self’ is also beautifully described by Skinner as the “speaker-as-own-listener.” In NVB, we not only lose touch with each other, but we lose touch with ‘ourselves’, with the "speaker-as-own-listener."


"The important function of structurally complex song appears simply to preclude perceiver boredom or habituation.” If in many nonhumans “Analogous anti-habituation effects have been shown at the molecular, cellular and neural levels as well” this indicates how vital the stimulating effects of human vocalizations must be. The nightingale doesn’t sing its beautiful song because it is stressed, anxious, frustrated or sad. In a similar fashion, in SVB, speakers are calm and peaceful and this is when our voice resonates at its optimum. It isn’t a matter of believing it, but of trying it out. During SVB we never get bored listening to each other, because each speaker is already his or her own listener. In NVB, on the other hand, we are bored, dull and insensitive and, consequently, relationships are so problematic and aversive that we want to escape from them and we become more and more isolated. 

The informational approach to courtship signals argues that “they must be honest to be functional.” This anthropomorphic  view overlooks the long-established fact that “perceivers have evolved sensory systems to detect, localize and discriminate important features of the environment; and that they must perform these functions in many contexts, not just in the service of mate choice.” Since there is phylogenetic continuity, humans can learn from non-humans that they have inherited by birth the ability to discriminate between SVB and NVB signals.

July 1, 2015

July 1, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

(Just so you know, I am in the process of posting my journal writings on my blog. That is why it is no up to date.  By the way, you can google these papers I am referring to).

This writing is my second response to “What do animal signals mean?” by Rendall, Owren & Ryan (2009). The statement by Cheney & Seyfarth (1996) that “mental mechanisms underlying the vocalization of nonhuman primates…appear to be fundamentally different than those that underlie human speech” presumes that nonhuman and human primates have “mental mechanisms.” This fictitious, but widespread concept has made it impossible to acknowledge that human conversation is often not real. In Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), neither the speaker really speaks nor the listener really listens.  In NVB, the speaker pretends to be speaking and the listener pretends to be listening and since most people are not aware of the great difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and NVB, they accept it, just like people once accepted the earth was flat and the center of the universe. Similarly, we still accept nonsensical “mental mechanisms” although we already know there are no words, there are only neurons with axons, dendrites, synapses and neurotransmitters in our brains. Firing neurons cannot tell us why we talk the way we do. Only environmental stimuli explain why SVB or NVB, why different brain activity occurs.

Behaviorism is inevitable. This is most obvious in research on nonverbal primates where inadequate verbiage stands out even more than in human communication. SVB and NVB have not been identified because, as we all know, in human speech people can endlessly beat around the bush. However, this is not the case with autistic children, and, not surprisingly, this is where behaviorism gains most of its credibility. Eventually, however, all our lousy and intellectually lazy mentalist constructs give way to a realistic behavioral account.  It is illustrative to read  how non-behaviorist animal researchers keep on changing their constructs. “Efforts to establish the meaning and referential quality of primate signals” are currently happening “under the banner” of “functional reference.” The effort mentalists put into maintaining their outdated way of talking by stretching the concept of language is absolutely laughable. Instead of adopting a genuine behaviorist view, they justify their ridiculous way of talking by saying “the motivation for this terminological change was to make clear that nonhuman animal calls are not exactly like human words, but rather appear to function in the same way.” If words really function in the same way as animal calls then they are not really all that different.  

These authors beautifully expose the mentalist bias which at any cost continues to “rely on the notion that signals have independent meaning, and are, like human words, ‘about’ things, even when signalers do not intend to transmit the information they are encoding” (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1996). If these researchers, instead of responding to each other’s work in writing, would actually talk together about these matters, it would soon become apparent that mentalists have more NVB than  behaviorists. The misinformation that is spread by the mentalist account perpetuates our NVB. Although behaviorists of course also have high rates of NVB, they are more inclined towards SVB as their theoretical perspective explains and stimulates it.

The authors correctly call the idea of “functional reference” an “oxymoron”, but this will not change the mentalist’s way of talking.  One can imagine the argument that happens when one person tells the other person that he or she is wrong, while the other thinks that he or she is right. We are all familiar with such conversations which can never go anywhere, because it is NVB. 

The change from NVB to SVB is as much needed for mentalists as behaviorists.  The concept of “functional reference” is like McDonald’s, who sells hamburgers and milkshakes with the slogan “I’m loving it”, that is, by putting words into people's  mouths. As in NVB the behavior of the speaker is presumably  more important than the behavior of the listener, “functional reference” seems to imply “that the information conveyed simply allows the receivers to infer the context of signal production.“ 

This dualistic going back and forth between the ends of some imaginary continuum is another characterization of NVB. If  speakers and listeners are construed as existing at the ends of the continuum, it would preclude the speaker-as-own-listener.  Naturally, in NVB the speaker doesn’t listen to him or herself while he or she speaks.  This happens only during SVB, in which the two behaviors are joined as they occur at the same rate. 

When “either distinction between the end points evaporates” the speaker is the listener and the listener is the speaker. The fact that these mentalist animal researchers, against all logic, continue to hang on to their “conceptual and empirical ambiguities” proves that their NVB overemphasizes the behavior of the speaker.  Indeed, the “placement of a signal on the continuum thus comes to depend less on its purported information content and more on whether one adopts the signaler’s or perceiver’s perspective.” A speaker can only adopt the perceiver’s perspective to the extent that he or she perceives him or herself, that is, to the extent that he or she listens to him or herself as he or she speaks.  Moreover, the SVB speaker is used to turn-taking in which he or she becomes the listener and someone else can then become the speaker.  

In NVB there is an absence of turn-taking, which means that one person usually does all the talking, while the other person only listens and then does what he or she is told to do. Such hierarchical communication is similar to communication of nonhuman primates. Separate treatment of signalers and receivers in nonhuman primates is foremost a consequence of human NVB, but also, of evolution, which puts our nose on the “distinct roles in the communication process” of “senders and perceivers”, “including often divergent interests”.   

To identify NVB and SVB, we must maintain an evolutionary natural perspective. “In this view, the function of signaling is to influence the behavior of perceivers rather than metaphorically transmit meaningful, language-like information.” The SVB/NVB distinction is equally applicable to nonhuman primates as it emphasizes “the role of signal structure in effecting such influence” and expands “the concept of communication well beyond just representational-like exchanges.” 

Everyone who experienced SVB agrees that NVB is superficial, because in it we fixate on what we are saying at the expense of how we are saying it.  NVB speakers are upsetting to listen to. It wouldn’t be adaptive if “alarm vocalizations produced upon encountering dangerous predators” weren’t “short” and “abrupt” and “noisy.” 

 

“Brainstem regions regulating whole body arousal and activation” are involved in the elicitation of “the listener’s immediate orienting response and movements preparatory to flight.” With NVB social engagement is impossible due to activation of lower brain regions. What Stephen Porges (2001) calls immobilization (freeze) response and mobilization (fight or flight) response is a “highly conserved response system” that is “traceable to detection and localization functions related to predator avoidance and prey capture in in early vertebrates (Grothe, 2003). 

Primates don’t react to what alarm calls mean and that is why we need a non-informational account which “looks at more concrete explanations grounded in the influence that specific acoustic properties have on broadly conserved neural, sensory, affective and learning systems in listeners that together help to support adaptive behavioral responding.” In NVB our voices often “have sharp onsets, dramatic frequency and amplitude fluctuations and chaotic spectral structures, which are exactly the sort of features that have direct impact on animal nervous systems.” Moreover, “such sounds are common in infants and juveniles, who otherwise have little influence on the behavior of older and larger animals.” Our high rates of NVB can be explained by saying that we are developmentally stuck. In NVB, we keep demanding each other's attention like children.  

When the speaker in NVB demands the attention of the listener it takes a lot of energy and effort to listen to such a speaker. “A frustrated primate weanling cannot force its mother to nurse, but can readily elicit such behavior with sounds whose acoustic features trigger the mother’s attentional mechanisms, increase her arousal state, and with repetition become very aversive.” We don’t look at it this way, but whenever we try to coerce each other with our NVB way of speaking, we behave in a similar fashion. 

In SVB, by contrast, the speaker’s sound gives, creates and maintains attention and is easy to listen to. Consequently, what is said is understood better, quicker and without any effort. The voice of the NVB speaker has been described as stabbing, grabbing, punching, pulling, choking and draining, but the voice of the SVB speaker has been described as soothing, uplifting, space-creating, validating, supporting and energizing. 

The authors are on the right track to discover NVB when they state “Adults can be similarly impotent when interacting with more dominant individuals. “ They describe the nonverbal version of NVB. Moreover, these kind of “squeaks, shrieks and screams” are “a class of vocalizations produced by many primates but also by many other mammals, bird and crocodilians.”

June 30, 2015

June 30, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

The following writing is a response to “What do animals mean?” by Rendall, Owen & Ryan (2009). This paper explains that human vocal verbal behavior, speaking, is embedded in and inextricably connected with our nonverbal vocalizations, which, rather than carrying information, induce affective responses in the listener. Although, like the authors, I will mention “sensory and physiological processes that support signaling and responding in listeners”, I will mainly focus on our vocal verbal behavior in which a speaker affects the body of the listener. 

The sound of the speaker is a stimulus, which always has only one of two effects: it can affectively or appetitively influence the nervous system of the listener, which increases the listener's approach behavior, or it can negatively, aversively or noxiously affect the listener, which will increases escape and avoidance behaviors. By studying how animals influence each other, we get a more realistic perspective on how humans influence each other with vocal verbal behavior. The fact that humans have language doesn't mean that they don't do exactly the same as animals. We too affectively influence each other with the sound of our voice. 

With Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), however, a speaker increases the probability of a listener’s approach behavior, but with Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the speaker increases the probability of escape and avoidance behaviors in the listener. The two different sounds involved in SVB and NVB result into different behavior. 

The authors, who study animal communication, are against the term “information” because it is “inadequate for many of the problems in behavioral ecology.” Skinner is for the same reason against any kind of mentalist concepts, which really don’t explain anything. In his book Verbal Behavior (1957), he introduces new terminology that refers to environmental variables which make our language possible. Humans should know that animal and human communication “suffers from the lack of clear and rigorous definitions of information, yet nonetheless affords the construct a central explanatory role.” 

As the definition of verbal behavior is itself a verbal activity, it remains easy to get carried away by the very words which are used to describe the verbal behavior. Wittgenstein has called this a ‘language game’. For radical behaviorists words like 'verbal behavior' are meaningful as they are part of a community that regularly uses those words. Mentalists don't think these words are meaningful as they are not involved in this 'game’. If we would consider words as tools, we would have a better chance of using them in ways which are agreed upon and therefore useful. 

My point is that animal communication is as impaired by the words that we use as human communication. It doesn’t even matter whether we use words like “information” or “influence”, as it takes away our attention from the fact that the speaker either appetitively or aversively influences the listener. In the former, which is Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the speaker and the listener are equals and they take turns, but during the latter, turn-taking is absent because one is more important than the other. Moreover, the latter is based on the continuation of negative emotions, but the former involves positive emotions. 

By looking at and listening to animal communication, we are  able to admit that it applies equally to human interaction and that “informational focus, whether explicitly articulated or unknowingly adopted, unduly narrows the focus of study and limits the range of questions asked and problems investigated”.

The authors state “burden of communication falls squarely on the disembodied ‘packet of information’ encoded in the signal flowing from signaler to receiver. “ What do humans have in common with “taxa as diverse as primates and frogs and signaling phenomena as diverse as predator alarm calls and mating displays?” I think that nonverbal animals have more in common with our spoken communication than we, who are both  verbal and nonverbal, are capable of admitting.

We have anthropomorphized animals, but when we, due to the great work of these authors, finally stop doing that, we are left with a new way of looking at how we as humans talk; we have an observable, measurable behavioral account. Moreover, this account is extended by the two vocal subsets: SVB is bi-directional, reciprocal and onto-genetically determined (learned during our life time) and NVB is hierarchical or uni-directional and phylogenetically determined (genetically determined behavior).

In spite of the common belief that “listeners responded to such vocalizations in equally appropriate and specific ways as if semantic information had been exchanged” (underlining added), mentalist researchers couldn’t help but notice that  “some vocalizations in animals were found to be produced in specific contexts, such as when encountering predators of food.” This was, however, again interpreted in a mentalist fashion, as if these “outcomes suggested that some animals might use vocalizations in a representational fashion, similar to the way humans use words.” What was missed and distorted by this mentalist account was that these so-called ‘representations’ are inferred from what animals do and don’t explain anything. Mentalist inferences take our attention away from what animals do - in order to refer to ‘representation’ as if animals somehow prove that humans “use vocalizations in a representational fashion.”(!)

  

What we could learn from “signaling primate species closely related to humans” is there is “a surprising absence of the intention by calling animals” (underlining added). Why was it surprising? It was surprising as humans expected it. However, in humans there is also no such a thing as intention, which is a fabricated construct. Mentalist animal researchers have continued to interpret their findings as ways of proving that humans are very different from animals as they have language.  

Although humans, as listeners, also “sometimes respond to vocalizations ‘as if’ they contain semantic information, callers [speakers] prove to be fundamentally unaware of the information value of their own signals.” This is a illustrative  reference to NVB. In NVB, the speaker doesn’t know that he or she is negatively influencing others by how he or she speaks. When a NVB speaker is interrupted by someone, he or she almost always immediately reacts aggressively. This response is automatic and below the level of awareness. It only reaches the level of awareness if the environment supports SVB, but, most environments only support NVB. Moreover, emphasis on the so-called information is always used in NVB as an end which justifies the means, to coerce the listener to do whatever the speaker wants him or her to do. “Data on the neural control of [animal] vocal production” suggests that “it primarily involves involuntary processes.”

As mammals humans have different brains than many other animals. Birds and lizards, for instance, depend on brain structures that are much older than, and therefore hierarchically below, the neocortex, which is unique for mammals. In humans, the neural control of the neocortex made possible complex forms of behavior such as social behavior, which led to tool making and to language and consciousness. Stephen Porges (2001) argues that from ancient brain mechanisms such as the brain stem and the limbic system, which facilitate immobization and mobilization responses during threatening situations, the most recent structure of the neocortex emerged, which mediates our social engagement. His Poly Vagal Perspective (2001) states we instantaneously revert to these older embedded brain structures which activate our visceral or autonomic response. Thus, in a case of a threat, our neocortex shuts down and we immediately revert back to mobilization, that is, to fleeing or fighting and if that isn’t possible, we freeze and immobilize, in order to not be seen by the predator. Porges’ Poly Vagal theory basically explains that we can’t talk as long as we are fearful, aggressive or frozen. 

This is additional evidence for SVB, in which there is no aversive stimulation and no need to freeze, flee or fight. Furthermore, Poly Vagal theory also explains why Social Engagement is impossible as long as our mobilization or our immobilization responses are triggered; we have NVB as long as that happens. 

In terms of signaling, an animal’s sense of safety is of utmost importance. Misinterpretation of a threatening signal can mean death. The details of a signal can only become important when they are safe. The fact that “more recent findings highlight an informational disconnect between signalers and perceivers” seems to “suggest they do not share the same representational parity that characterizes human speech.” This seems to be another misinterpretation. What can be learned from animals is that if we listen to how someone sounds, we accurately determine if he or she is threatening us or making us feel safe and we can learn to differentiate between SVB and NVB. 

“Vocal verbal behavior [in animals] is modulated primarily by involuntary processes involving sub-cortical brain structures, such as the limbic system, the mid-brain and the brain-stem. In contrast, language production in humans involves a variety of sub-cortical circuits but relies importantly on volitionally controlled processes in temporal –and frontal-lobe cortical regions” (Lieberman, 2002). Sub-cortical regions are involved only to the extent that they mediate safety and well-being as that activates the temporal-and frontal-lobe cortical regions.