November 8, 2016

November 8, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my second response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” by Jaak Panksepp (2011). Each time we speak we express the primary emotions Panksepp refers to in his paper; we either stimulate positive emotions or negative emotions in each other. During the former, we, that is the speaker AND the listener, engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), but during the latter, we engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

When we cannot acknowledge that the sound of our own voice always expresses our feelings, we can only pretend that we are not emotionally affected and this is what we repeatedly do when we engage in NVB. Panksepp explains that “Affective feelings come in several varieties, including sensory, homeostatic, and emotional (which I focus on here). Primary-process emotional feelings arise from ancient caudal and medial subcortical regions, and were among the first subjective experiences to exist on the face of the earth. Without them, higher forms of conscious “awareness” may not have emerged in primate brain evolution.” Did you get that? When we talk, we always feel something!

Unexpressed feelings result into unconscious behavior, but properly expressed emotions result into conscious behavior. However, as long as we don’t listen to how we sound while we speak, as long as we are in and affected by a threatening environment, we cannot accurately describe our feelings. Knowledge about primary-process emotional feelings will help us to finally completely express ourselves. “Because of homologous “instinctual” neural infrastructures, we can utilize animal brain research to reveal the nature of primary-process human affects.”  

November 7, 2016

November 7, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my first response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” (another paper) by Jaak Panksepp (2011). The answer is, of course, unequivocally: YES! The purpose of this writing is to demonstrate that Panksepp’s research on primary emotions maps  onto the two general ways of talking, which can be heard in humans: Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

Simply stated, in SVB we express positive emotions, but in NVB we express negative emotions. “The primal affects are intrinsic brain value systems that unconditionally and automatically inform animals how they are faring in survival.” Our voice indicates how we are faring with our survival. When we talk, our sound communicates if we are safe or not.

Panksepp’s “brain value systems” produce two different kinds of sounds which “serve an essential function in emotional learning. The positive affects index “comfort zones” that support survival, while negative affects inform animals of circumstances that may impair survival.” It can’t be stated more clearly than that. Read it three times please!

Knowing the difference between SVB and NVB will make us realize that our way of talking either supports or impairs our survival. Mankind’s survival is threatened by how we talk with each other. Our sense of community is lost as we engage mostly in NVB and less and less in SVB.

We fail to acknowledge that NVB stimulates and maintains our negative affect and that only SVB can stimulate and maintain our positive affect. As long as we don’t pay attention to the fact that we speak with a sound which threatens our survival, NVB will undermine our relationships. We need Panksepp’s brain value systems to survive.

November 6, 2016

November 6, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

Here is my analysis of the results of the American presidential election. Now that Donald Trump is done campaigning with his Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), he is toning it down in his graceful acceptance speech as the real work must begin. The real work is Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Difficult as this may be to accept, the outcome of this election is a victory for SVB. Regardless of what one may feel about his demeanor, he won as he was more authentic than Hillary Clinton.

The majority of Americans is sick and tired of scripted, predetermined and mechanical speech, which is NVB. Trump’s outsider’s, non-political, entertainer’s, unconventional approach won him the election as he was powerful enough to be blatantly himself. In effect, he expresses more SVB than Clinton, who can only pretend to express SVB. Our conflicted and polarized country now demands that we take a closer and more realistic look at how we are actually communicating with each other.

Our technology forces us to look at ourselves and to become aware of ourselves. Although Trump doesn’t know the difference between SVB and NVB, he has the behavioral history that allows him to recognize the difference between authenticity and phoniness. His speech is different from anybody else. He has ‘authentic’ NVB and was chosen for expressing the widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Whether we know it or not, we are in the process of coming to terms with NVB, which has been around since the dawn of men. We cannot engage in ongoing SVB as long as we haven’t explored and understood NVB. This election was NOT about what was said, but about how it was said. How we say things is much more essential to how the speaker is perceived by the listener than we have previously believed. Mankind’s history has definitely been with NVB, but mankind’s future is with SVB.

November 5, 2016

November 5, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my final response to “The Power of the Word May Reside in the Power of Affect” (2007) by Jaak Panksepp. As you can read, my dear reader, this is another paper which I have read which brings a ton of evidence for the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Many, many academics are trying to point out the same thing, but are coming at it from a different angle.

As a behaviorist, I don’t think that additional empirical exploration of the primary processes, which were already carefully investigated by Jaak Panksepp, will be able to dispel the “non-affective cognitivistic thought.” What urgently needs to be identified and stopped is what maintains this thought: our malicious Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

It was of course never “our cognitive preconceptions” which “have historically confused and shielded the way toward an evolutionary understanding of language and the associated heights of the human mind,” but it was our way of talking, which was considered to be of a lesser importance than our writings that made us verbally fixated.

Rather than academically arguing about “evolutionary understanding of language” or “the heights of the human mind”, we need Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) to have healthy harmonious relationships. High rates of NVB signify the breakdown of relationship. “It will be most interesting to see how the epigenetic emergence of language cortex is programmed by our social-emotional encounters, especially those playful secure bases within which mothers coax their children to become affective resonant creatures of culture.” Panksepp indicates safe environments.

Panksepp describes SVB: “to do that well, it was essential for recent brain developments to have retained an implicit understanding, that it is important to speak about the emotional complexities of our lives – the more poetically and musically, the better.”  Our “musical-emotional nature” stimulates SVB, but what loud-mouth morons like Steven Pinker have dismissively described as “cultural cheesecake” only perpetuates NVB.

November 4, 2016

November 4, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my tenth response to “The Power of the Word May Reside in the Power of Affect” (2007) by Jaak Panksepp. The power of affect can only be revealed as long as there is no aversive stimulation during our interaction. Only during Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) are we “wise” enough “to recognize that the neocortex, that obligatory processor of linguistic abilities, has no intrinsic power to be conscious on its own.”

In Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), we falsely assume it is all about what we say and therefore we speak in a disembodied, unconscious, mechanical manner, like talking heads. Indeed, “without the basic attentional, emotional and motivational powers of the non-linguistic subcortical regions, it [the neocortex] would be perpetually asleep.”  

When people are for the first time introduced to the SVB/NVB distinction, they are totally shocked to learn they were unconscious due to their own way of talking; only SVB makes us conscious. NVB “reflects an impoverished understanding of language.” And, NVB makes people “cling to the evolutionary-psychology “dream” (or “nightmare”) that the human cortex contains abundant evolutionarily-honed functional “modules” as opposed to enormous epigenetic potentials.”

I fully agree with Panksepp, who is unknowingly, but correctly, calling the NVB “dream” a “nightmare.” However, it is not only “unlikely”, it is absolutely impossible “that basic learning and conditioning could proceed without affective rewards.” Learning always requires SVB as NVB can’t and doesn’t produce “affective rewards.” Panksepp praises Shanahan for “swimming against the tide of non-affective cognitivistic thought” as he doesn’t yet know how to flow with the SVB stream.