November 13, 2016

November 13, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my seventh response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” Panksepp, who studied behaviorism, takes issue with the fact that behavioral neuro-scientists use “the generic general-purpose traditional terms such as “reward” and “punishment” with little consideration of what such key brain processes that control learning mean in psychological terms.”

Our affective experiences can only be properly investigated while we are involved in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), but they are continuously misrepresented and neglected during Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). When there is too much of an emphasis on what we say, that is, on the scientific definitions, we no longer pay attention to the nonverbal, that is, to how we sound and to how we experience our sound while we speak.

When I explain the SVB/NVB distinction people often ask me questions which only seem to lead to more questions, but which prevent them from experiencing the conversation. As long as people demand answers to their questions, they are NOT open to experiencing SVB, but once they experience it, they understand it. In SVB the experience of safety, comfort, calmness, well-being and effortlessness comes first and understanding follows from this phenomenological experience.

In NVB terms like “reward” or “punishment” are more important than how the listener experiences the speaker. The listener is supposed to try to listen to, to pay attention to and to understand the speaker who speaks AT him or her. Panksepp writes “It is now quite reasonable to envision that external rewards and punishments actually control learning by modulating the affective neural substrates of the brain, but that is a view that has hardly been addressed.” Why is Panksepp’s work not widely accepted? I tell you why: it is impossible to talk about affective neuroscience as we unknowingly engage again and again in NVB. I appreciate that he tries to reach out. I fully understand him.

November 12, 2016

November 12, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my sixth response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” The Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) / Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction may turn out to be an important hypothesis for behavioral neuroscientists, who think “about how experiences emerge from brains, especially those of other animals.” Simply stated, how we sound expresses how we feel. If we sound stressed, we feel stressed, if we sound happy, we feel happy.

The question if other animals have emotional lives is answered when we listen to how they sound. Basically, when they are stressed or happy they sound pretty much the same as we do. Their positive or negative emotional vocalizations map beautifully onto the SVB/NVB distinction.

Those of us who own pets need no scientific evidence to prove that animals have emotional lives. Panksepp claims to NOT understand that “most neuroscientists who study animal behavior (i.e., behavioral neuro-scientists and neuro-ethologists) remain skeptical of such conclusions, and generally prefer to sustain an agnostic silence on such issues.”

I am not surprised by this blatant denial as I acknowledge that the majority of people, specifically those in academia, engage mainly in NVB and only minimally engage in SVB. NVB is the norm everywhere and SVB is the exception. That even animal researchers “remain skeptical” about something so obvious as animal emotions and “generally prefer to sustain an agnostic silence on such issues” describes their common dissociative, mentalistic, non-scientific way of talking which I call NVB.

Panksepp, like Skinner, is against NVB. When we listen to videos of these two men, we hear the openness, gentleness and sensitivity that is characteristic for SVB. However, Panksepp, who specifically focuses on the affective basis of behavior, has even more SVB than Skinner.   

November 11, 2016

November 11, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fifth response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” by Jaak Panksepp (2011). I love this man who dedicated his career to understanding emotions of our “fellow creatures” so as to create an evolutionary foundation for human emotions. According to Panksepp “our emotional feelings are grounded on ”instinctual behavioral” neural networks that evolved long before humans walked the face of the earth.” I deeply appreciate his willingness to talk with other researchers about his profound findings.

Why would Panksepp emphasize that “Clear dialogue in this area requires a disciplined distinction between the affective-emotional aspects of experience and the widely studied cognitive and emotional-behavioral aspects of human and animal Brain-Minds ?” He is trying to use his neuroscientific knowledge to make the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In SVB the speaker evokes and maintains positive emotions in the listener, but in NVB the speaker elicits negative emotions in the listener.

Panksepp identifies “evolved brain functions in terms of primary processes (tools for living provided by evolution), secondary-processes (the vast unconscious learning and memory mechanisms of the brain), and tertiary-processes (the higher order functions of mind permitted largely by the cortical expansions that allow many thought-related symbolic functions).” This maps onto radical behaviorism’s phylogenetic, ontogenetic and cultural causes of behavior. However, the SVB/NVB distinction brings our attention to how these processes sound to the listener when they are expressed by speakers during our conversations.

“Primal emotions are among the most important aspects of our mental lives—they bring us great joys and sorrows and intrinsically help anticipate the future—but behavioral neuroscientists have offered few hypotheses about how experiences emerge from brains, especially those of other animals.” I don’t think that behavioral neuroscientists will come up with hypotheses about how we talk about these primary processes. Panksepp is probably as good as it gets. However, it should be clear to the reader that the processes he describes have different sounds. In SVB we expresses positive, but in NVB we expresses negative emotions.

November 10, 2016

November 10, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fourth response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” by Jaak Panksepp (2011). As it is now possible to “neuro-scientifically understand primary emotional human feelings by studying animal behavior” it is apparent that our “affective feelings arise from the unconditioned emotional response systems of the brain.” Moreover, the seven emotional systems that Panksepp has identified determine how we sound while we speak.

Whether we express our positive or negative emotions, of course, sounds totally different. However, positive primary emotions such as CARE, PLAY, LUST, SEEKING and JOY and negative primary emotions such as RAGE, FEAR and PANIC produce remarkably similar sounds in animals as in humans. I propose that we call the expression of these positive emotions while we speak, Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and expression of negative emotions, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

Panksepp’s work explains “how the brain generates affective feelings – the valenced phenomenal experiences (qualia) that come in desirable (positive) and undesirable (negative) forms and varieties.” I am interested in how these desirable or undesirable experiences set the stage for two mutually exclusive, different-sounding ways of talking.

Panksepp’s aim is to “understand the affective (subjective feeling) component of emotions through close and sensitive studies of the underlying brain mechanisms in other creatures”, but my goal is to TALK about and explore the difference between SVB and NVB and to accurately express and understand our human affective experiences.  

November 9, 2016

November 9, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my third response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” by Jaak Panksepp (2011). “Since all vertebrates appear to have some capacity for primal affective feelings, the implications for animal-welfare and how we ethically treat other animals are vast.” Although Panksepp advocates for animals, he is putting the proverbial horse behind the wagon. It is out of the question that animals have affective lives. The real question he should ask is: how do we humans communicate our affective lives?

Researchers investigate the affective lives of animals hoping they will learn something about the affective lives of humans. Our language gets in the way of expressing our primary emotions. Panksepp writes about animal welfare, but, of course, human welfare is at stake. Without the accurate expression of our primary emotional processes there can be no human-welfare, and, consequently, no animal-welfare.  Furthermore, since we humans also “have some capacity for primal affective feelings, the implications” for “how we ethically treat other” humans “are vast.”

Only if we engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) will we be able to know more about our own affective lives. It is not coincidental that we are still so often involved in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which induces negative affect. Humans are still in the process of learning how to express their emotions with language. Our words get in the way of expressing our feelings. Due to our repeated failures to accurately express our feelings, we make it seem, while engaged in NVB, as if we don’t even have any emotions, as if our emotional expression is not necessary anymore or as if we don’t even need to have affective lives.