January 14, 2018

Dear Reader,

When people say “I never would have thought that!” they usually mean that the thought never occurred to them or that there was nothing they could think of which would have caused the thought to occur. Thus, they use this expression when they hear or discover something which surprises them. Also, people would say things like “I would have never believed it.” This is after they’ve found out that something, which they didn’t or couldn’t believe, turned out to be actually true. I would like you to consider another explanation for why you would never think of certain things or why you are unable to believe things which are true.

As conversations about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) have brought about many new ideas, we want to think about these ideas and we also want to believe in these new possibilities, because thinking and believing in the SVB/NVB distinction has wonderful implications. We can’t help but notice that we have now accumulated a knowledge which nobody knows about or has access to. There is no way anymore in which we can avoid the realization that it is up to us, as we are the only ones who know. Moreover, we are right about what we know. We know that we know that we know something which others absolutely don’t know.

Being right always comes with great responsibility as we cannot undo what we really know. We can only go further with it, knowing that we are someone who is fully conscious about how it works. This realization confront us with our fears about being right; the fact that we are right makes us see that everyone is wrong. However, we are right not because we have SVB and they aren’t wrong because they have NVB, but we are right because we can see what is what and they can’t.

Although those who are ignorant about the SVB/NVB distinction can and will reject us who know about it, they can’t affect our knowledge. As a matter of fact, our knowledge is strengthened from all this rejection. We certainly can and do affect those who don’t know about the SVB/NVB distinction, although it doesn’t really matter for us whether we chose to do so or not. We may for various reasons stay with those who are unaware about the SVB/NVB distinction or we may at some point decide to leave them, but no matter whether we stay or leave, we leave them anyway as our knowledge can’t be stopped from expanding.

We know what we know and this knowledge is such that nobody can put us under their control anymore. We don’t have any obligation to change them, to help them or to suffer because of them as we have already done that and we know we are not going to do that again. We know that we know that we know that they don’t know. Nobody else can know for us. Although we share what we know with others, who, like us, know what is true, we remain independent and are aware about the taboo of claiming our knowledge. We, who have acquired this precious knowledge, are very different and we are each going our own unique way with SVB. Our certainty about the future is that it will be exciting, fulfilling, stimulating and novel.
 
Dear Reader,

Of all the people, it is, of course, the behaviorist, who ought to be able to understand, acknowledge, and, most importantly, explain, that our more and more polarized, destructive, political discourse is a result of environmental variables which are not discussed by anyone. The reason that nobody is capable of analyzing today’s politicization of just about any topic is that we fail to acknowledge that it has to do with our way of speaking. Due to the feedback which is provided by our social media, our way of talking can no longer be hidden or diverted away from. 

Everyday our horrid Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is visible and audible, but yet we haven’t been able to do anything about it as we refuse to trace its origins to the environments from which it emerges. Since we are all fighting and arguing with each other it should be obvious that we are either finding ourselves in hostile environments which inevitably elicit our current NVB or we express such high rates of NVB since we have for so long been in and endured and survived such aversive, threatening environments. Most likely it is a combination of both.

Once we recognize the difference between NVB and Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) there is no escaping from the profoundly troubling notion that SVB is, for the most part, made impossible, and, therefore, only occurring at a very low response rate. Yet, this natural way of talking in which communicators are at peace with each other is essential to relationship and to the way in which we bring order in society. Those who promote fabricated advantages of NVB would consider the possibility of SVB as idealistic, as they lack the necessary skills to teach it to others.

SVB is NOT as superficial as merely trying to talk nice to each other. The issue of trying to be nice indicates we presumably have to overcome some tendency of not being nice. Similarly, we are also told to have more respect, to be more open, to be more empathic and to be less judgmental, less violent, less impatient. Where are the knowledgeable behavior analysts, who would be capable of saying that we are only told to be all these things, which never seem to get accomplished, while we are involved in NVB? The fact is, they don’t exist as they have yet to learn about the SVB/NVB distinction. Had they learned about this distinction, they would have known that safety and comfort are absolutely necessary for SVB as well for learning any other proper social behavior. Rather than being political, rather than participating in and reinforcing NVB, they would have advocated for the science of human behavior by promoting SVB.

January 15, 2018

Dear Reader,

People tell me every day what it is like for them to listen to the sound of their voice while they speak. Of course, I listen to the sound of my voice every day as well. Consequently, I have gathered a lot of information about what it is like when we listen to ourselves while we speak. Nobody in the world knows about this matter as much as I do.

People keep telling me that nobody has ever told them to listen to themselves while they speak (we were all basically told to listen to someone else and not to ourselves). In other words, it is because of me that they begin to seriously listen to themselves. They may have listened to themselves before, but they had never done it consciously and continuously.

When people listen to themselves while they speak, they engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and they realize that they were not listening to themselves in most of their previous conversations. They recognize that they were not capable of doing that before. Now that they are capable of having ongoing SVB, they are able to acknowledge that previously they were mainly involved in and conditioned by Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), and, therefore, they would mainly produce NVB. They discover that they don’t need to do this anymore and they begin to explore SVB.

The more people explore SVB, the more they will have it with me, with others, but, most importantly, with themselves. In ongoing SVB they are able to say and understand new things about themselves and others, which they had wanted to say, but couldn’t say before. SVB is about expressing all our private speech in public speech. Of course, this is impossible under most circumstances. When people express what they think and feel regardless of the negative consequences, they are said to have no boundaries. However, no matter how inappropriate it is to tell others what we are really thinking and feeling, even if we sometimes do this and get rejected, punished, ridiculed, judged and humiliated, it is still a valuable experience. I suggest to everyone to spend a lot of time just talking out loud by ourselves as this creates the least negative complications for us.

When we talk out loud with ourselves and when we listen to the sound of our thoughts and feelings, but without trying to change anything (we are not trying to sound good, confident or happy), it is apparent how easy and effortless SVB is and how this should also be possible with others in the same way. We all know that when we are with others immediately all sorts of complications arise. Thus, to get used to SVB, it is much more practical to explore it alone, as this gives us the opportunity to familiarize ourselves with the contingency which makes SVB possible.

To have ongoing SVB with others, we need to be able to create and maintain, with our way of talking, the same safe, comfortable, supportive contingency, which we have already experienced and explored by ourselves. Of course, we make ‘mistakes’ and engage in NVB when we may believe that we are engaging in SVB, but as we ‘catch up’ with ourselves, no time or energy is lost on having guilt feelings about NVB as this is all part of NVB. We can express our sense of shame about again and again engaging in NVB as we realize that we have gotten it wrong all along.

There is no reason to blame ourselves or each other as we were all conditioned to have high rates of NVB. We can’t help speaking Dutch or French and it makes absolutely no sense to feel bad about the fact that we grew up in a Dutch or a French verbal community. The same is true for NVB. SVB, therefore, is really like speaking a foreign language, however, the only big difference is that you know it already by the mere fact that you are able to speak. When you engage in SVB, you immediately notice how incredibly comforting and energizing it is and you also suddenly are able to understand why NVB is incredibly energy-draining.

In NVB you were never really attending to yourself as you always were preoccupied with others. It is not narcissism or ego-centrism to talk out loud by yourself and to discover that what you really think and feel is necessary to live a healthy, happy, productive and peaceful life. With NVB there was nothing but trouble. Just as it is easy to ‘forgive’ yourself for the fact that you were involved in it and couldn’t help being involved in it, it is equally easy and simple to let others know that their suffering is over once they engage in SVB. I know that all the cynics will love to attack me on this as they have done so every chance they got. The fact is, however, that their attacks are part of a pattern of vocal verbal behavior (NVB), which has nothing to do with me.

I have investigated, understood and acknowledged the pattern of speech, which I call NVB. This pattern is totally different from the pattern which I call SVB. Those who engage in SVB are not engaging in NVB. They may be affected at some point and engage in NVB again, but they either engage in SVB or in NVB. In other words, they always only engage in one or the other. This knowledge is comforting, but unknown to most people. Consequently, everyone is trying to improve, everybody is trying to have a better relationship, everyone is either working on themselves or on others. However, once we know about the SVB/NVB distinction, we stop working on ourselves or on each other. You could actually say that we suddenly find ourselves without work.

When we engage in SVB, we don’t do what we usually do. Thus, SVB instantaneously replaces NVB and the issue of SVB ‘outcompeting’ NVB doesn’t even arise! The immediacy of this shift is verifiable and apparent to all. When one person is in front of people who are familiar with the SVB/NVB distinction, they will all agree when he or she shifts from NVB to SVB or from SVB to NVB. Moreover, even after we have become trained in observing our own and each other’s SVB and NVB, we keep being intrigued and stimulated by the beauty and freshness of SVB. We all find out how to express SVB in the way which is unique to us and we can recognize each other’s uniqueness.

Dear Reader,

Since we, as human beings, can acquire very quickly the vocal verbal behavior that is appropriate to a particular environment, we don’t have much of a need, as Skinner writes in his paper “Selection by Consequences” (1981), for “an innate repertoire.” A baby, who was born in the United States and is raised in the Chinese verbal community ,will learn to speak Chinese and a Chinese baby which is raised in the United States readily learns to speak English without any problem.

Ideally, the operant learning involved in becoming verbal not only supplements natural selection, but it actually replaces it. It has yet to be recognized, however, that Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is absolutely needed for respondent behavior to be outcompeted and replaced by operant behavior. Stated differently, we have not been able to become fully verbal as our environment inevitably favored Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

Although there are obviously tremendous advantages to our more sophisticated operant verbal repertoire, we have not been able to capitalize on this as the SVB/NVB distinction was not yet known. NVB has unknowingly been a stand-in-the-way to verbal learning throughout human history.
Skinner gives two simple examples: one about food and one about sex. He differentiates between food, which is eaten simply for survival value (in which case eating is a product of natural selection) and eating that results from “the evolution of special susceptibilities.” Under the former circumstances food “does not need to be, and presumably is not, a reinforcer,” but under the latter circumstances eating is operantly controlled. Also, when sexual behavior is simply a product of natural selection, “sexual contact does not need to be, and presumably is not, a reinforcer.” Like food, sex only becomes a reinforcer “through the evolution of special susceptibilities.” With these two examples it is very easy to think about our verbal behavior.

Our verbal is like any other behavior. Stimuli in the environment set the stage for our verbal responses, which are followed by consequences, which then either increase or decrease their likelihood. In operant conditioning we speak about reinforcement when we refer to the increase of behavior and punishment when we refer to the decrease of behavior. NVB is a function of our innate endowment. This coarse-grained behavior is insensitive to the environments in which people are reinforced for a their more fine-grained version of behaving verbally, environments in which SVB can and will occur. Just as food and sex are not reinforcers as long as they are only function of our phylogenetic history and only become reinforcers due to “the evolution of special susceptibilities”, so too can our verbal behavior become a reinforce or remain constrained. As long as our verbal behavior is still reactionary, involuntary behavior, it is controlled by our innate, nonverbal repertoire. Only if verbal behavior is (like food or sex) a reinforcer, is it under operant control.

We receive more positive reinforcement during the early stages of our overt verbal development than in the later phases of our lives. Moreover, as we mature, our verbal behavior recedes to a covert level. Thus, most of our verbal behavior occurs as private speech, commonly referred to as thinking. Furthermore, it is believed that reinforcement is no longer needed when we get older. All of this presumably prepares for being able to navigate our world in which NVB is everywhere, but SVB is happening only accidentally, momentarily and sporadically. At the early stages of development verbal behavior is under operant control, but during later phases of our lives, our verbal behavior is often, sadly, way too often, controlled by classical conditioning. Surely, becoming literate is all about becoming verbal, but while we are engaging in NVB, we are less verbal than we believe to be. Only in SVB can we be fully verbal.

January 16, 2018

Dear Reader,

If you don’t like to read my long texts, I would like you to suspend your tendency to stop reading. Why don’t you stick with it for once? And, why not read my words out loud so that you can listen to the sound of your voice as well? It is easy. It doesn’t cost you anything. As you do that you find that listening to yourself while reading these words out loud teaches you about listening to yourself while you speak. You may have never thought that speaking could be so effortless and so enjoyable, but it can be if you let it.

I am well aware that there are a million things which attract your attention, but I want to challenge you to listen to yourself instead of to others. When you read this text, you are not listening to me, but to yourself. As you put more energy into what it is like to listen to yourself you find that you almost never do this. This text is giving you the opportunity to do something which no other text would let you do. These words bring your attention to yourself. Because you listen to the sound of your speaking voice, you become aware of how you are feeling in this moment. These words don’t tell you what to feel, but they make it possible for you to pause a moment and take note of what you feel. You feel something different every moment, but when you speak with others, it is seldom possible to address these moment-to-moment fluctuations.

These words support you in feeling whatever you feel at this moment, no matter what it is. It is completely up to you to let yourself know what you feel. Many people have problems expressing what they feel as they don’t really know what they feel because it keeps changing from moment to moment. The confusion is not about what they feel, but it is their way of talking which doesn’t allow for the expression of the changes which happen from moment to moment. Once you get used to expressing whatever you feel, you will be no longer so confused. It is possible to do this. You are doing it right know whether you know it or not.

My long texts have an accumulative effect which can only be obtained if you read the whole piece. I don’t want you to race through these words and I write in such a way that this is not possible. Why are you so much in a hurry? Why can’t you slow down a bit and have some relief from your racing thoughts? If you want to continue being rushed, anxious, stressed and agitated, you probably don’t want to continue reading this description of your behavior as it is annoying and confronting. However, if you listen how your voice is expressing the sound of your hurry, fear, tension and anger, you would appreciate these words much more.

The longer time you spend listening to your voice, the more the importance of it begins to make sense to you. It is often said we should get better at listening to each other, but even if we do our best in trying to be better listeners, we still don’t succeed. Few us know that our ability to listen to others is only as good as our ability to listen to ourselves. In other words, we can’t and we don’t really listen to each other as long as we haven’t been stimulated to listen to ourselves; self-listening includes other-listening, but most other-listening excludes self-listening.

Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) stimulates us to listen to ourselves while we speak. When we engage in ongoing SVB we realize that listening to each other is never a problem. Other-listening is only a problem when we engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). As we are unfamiliar with the SVB/NVB distinction, we don’t realize that many, seemingly complicated, problems with listening to others are related to the fact that NVB speaker don’t listen to themselves, but force others to listen to them. My texts are long as they stimulate you to explore and accept the truth about the great difference between SVB and NVB. I do not claim to be able to convince you with my writings about the existence of these universal response classes; you will have to convince yourself.

January 17, 2018

Dear Reader,

As I am writing these words, I am not speaking out loud, but I have been listening to myself thousands of times. I have also read out loud what I was writing many, many times, but I am not reading out loud this time. I am reminded of the times I was speaking and reading out loud while I am just writing. These words are for you to be read out loud so that you can begin to hear your voice and realize how your Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is going to transform your life.

You are not going to changed by the SVB of others, but you are going to be changed by your own SVB. You have been wanting to hear the truth out of the mouth of a knowledgeable person, some authority, some guru, some teacher and you have listened to their lectures, their preaching and explanations, but none of that has made or could make you listen to yourself. To listen to yourself is something you have avoided. You have rehearsed your speech, you have been practicing what you were going to say, but that was not the same as listening to yourself while you speak.

When you listen to yourself while you speak, you have no notes, you don’t know what you are going to say. You are listening to yourself because you are not trying to listen to yourself. As long as you are trying to listen to yourself, you are not listening to yourself. To listen to yourself, you don’t need to try to listen to yourself. In other words, there is no tension in you at all when you are listening to yourself while you speak, when you engage in SVB. When that happens, it is so different from what you have been used to that you can’t help notice you weren’t doing this before. Thus, when you listen, you realize you were never listening before. Listening is always new, it renews you.

When you listen to yourself while you speak for the first time, you will not only realize that you were not listening to yourself before, but you also understand why you were not and why you could not listen to others. You didn’t and couldn’t really listen to others because you weren’t listening to yourself. While you are reading this and while you are hearing yourself say this, you also begin to notice that you are speaking differently. You didn’t speak like this and you couldn’t speak like this, but you are now learning to speak in a different way. You are learning to be SVB speaker instead of a Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) speaker. When you have SVB by yourself, you notice that you totally approve of it, you approve of yourself and nobody needs to approve of you.

I am able to write these words as I know what it is like to listen to myself while I speak and to engage in SVB. Your exploration will make you write differently too. As you learn to listen to yourself while you speak, you’ll find that self-listening makes you into a different kind of speaker, a SVB speaker who not only sounds differently, but who also says different things than the NVB speaker. The SVB speaker writes like this and as you should be able to notice, there is no writing like this anywhere. And, this Sound Writing Behavior (SWB) should help you understand that also SWB is nowhere to be found either. What you have been reading was not SWB, but Noxious Writing Behavior (NWB). In the same way that only SVB can help us understand what NVB is, so too only SWB can explain to us why NWB has been perpetuating NVB.

January 18, 2018

Dear Reader,

This writing is about being serious and about being taken serious. Most people are completely incapable of taking me serious as they don’t know how to be serious. Even if they try to be serious, they can never be serious enough. The person who takes me serious must be very serious. To take me serious, you must be as serious as I am and I tell you, I am very serious.

All the nonsense people post on their face book are failed attempts at being taken serious. People would like to be taken serious, but they aren’t as they don’t take themselves serious. Although they would rather be taken serious, people who take themselves serious really don’t care at all if other people don’t take them serious. They will not stop being serious when other people don’t take them serious. To the contrary, they will take themselves even more serious when others don’t take them serious. Since they know what it is like to be serious, they enjoy being serious. People don’t like being serious as they don’t know how to be serious. They make it seem as if there is something wrong with being serious, but since they can’t be serious, there is actually something wrong with them.

There is seriously something wrong with you when you can’t be serious about the way in which you talk. If you keep having Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), your life will be full of problems. To acknowledge that you are again and again engaging in NVB is a serious matter. You can blame me for being too serious, but your rejecting me is not changing the fact that what I say is true. You are constantly involved in NVB and this makes your life into a stressful, unhappy mess.

Being serious requires that you acknowledge your interactions aren’t working. You aren’t interacting. How can you call it interacting, if you are always right, if you always know it better, if you keep feeling upset, worried, stressed, fearful, angry and resentful? How can you call it interacting, if you force others? How can you call it interacting, if you keep separating from others instead of connecting with them? What kind of interaction is that? Seriously, when are you ever going to get serious about your superficial, insensitive, boring and unintelligent way of life in which you keep pretending to be better than others?

Unless you get serious about your involvement in NVB, you will never have any ongoing Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). You keep pretending to have SVB, but you are not having it. You keep pretending to be calm, friendly, positive, patient, open, understanding, empathic, accepting, in control, flexible, easy-going, loving, caring, smart, insightful, humble, spiritual, practical, capable, trustworthy, approachable, alert, truthful, hopeful, motivated, focused and reliable, but you are not. And, it is really bad you keep pretending to be all these things. There is seriously something wrong that you think that you already know what SVB is, when, in reality, you have no clue what it is.

If you really knew what SVB and NVB is, you would be writing and talking about it, but you are not doing that. The only way in which you can get serious about SVB and NVB is by talking and by writing about it. When are you going to do that? It also doesn’t make any difference if you repost what others have written. When are you going to take note of the undeniable fact that in NVB, you don’t care as a speaker how the listener is experiencing you? Once you as the speaker, begin to care about how the listener is experiencing you, you will speak very differently, you will sound very differently, you will write very differently as you will be thinking and feeling very differently. These words will be taken seriously by you only if they are spoken with your sound, which you are listening to, which makes you conscious, which makes you realize that being serious about how you sound is delightful.

january 19, 2018

Dear Reader,

I am a proud behaviorist, not one who was drilled by an educational system in which people are instructed not to be open to or experiment with the difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), but a self-taught behaviorist, who reads and knows more and keeps getting better at arranging his own environment to make his own behavior more effective. Although my behaviorism, of course, includes many others, it starts with me. If your knowledge about behaviorism doesn’t improve your life, you are incapable of improving the lives of others. If behaviorism doesn’t make your life better, you lack the skills to be able to make other people their lives better. And, if you pretend to make other people their lives better by bragging about you grand knowledge about behaviorism, you are causing harm.

To be a behaviorist, I don’t have to be talking about behaviorism all the time. Actually, I would be a bad behaviorist if I would be talking about behaviorism all the time. Those people who talk about behaviorism all the time are horrible behaviorists. I don’t agree with that kind of fanaticism and I don’t think it is productive. It is totally off-putting as it presupposes that you are somehow better than others. You may be right that you know more about the laws of human behavior, but the way in which you talk with others still determines whether that knowledge is accepted.

Unlike behaviorism, the SVB/NVB distinction is a topic which can and must be brought up every day. It deals with how we talk with each other and how your conversation not causes, but co-occurs with how you talk with yourself. Conversations with others relate to how you talk with yourself. The false notion that you are responsible for what you say to yourself, that you can cause what you think and believe, disconnects and dissociates you from how others have talked and still talk with you and how you have talked and still continue to talk with them. In NVB nobody is talking with anybody, but everybody is talking at each other.

The difference between talking at each other versus talking with each other is the difference between NVB and SVB. It can and it should be repeatedly described and explained as the difference between uni-directional and bi-directional interaction. I don’t think that uni-directional NVB, in which people talk at each other, push each other around, struggle and argue and put each other in their place, is interaction. NVB, which sadly is our common way of talking, is in fact a form of abuse. We have all heard about verbal abuse, but NVB is much more than that. The reason that NVB is so hard to analyze and hasn’t been touched by any behaviorist, is because it creates and maintains the illusion that we are behaving verbally, while in fact our words inaccurately describe and therefore make us disown our nonverbal behavior.

In NVB we pretend as if there are two environments: the environment which within our own skin and the environment which is outside of our own skin. You keep talking nonsense as long as you believe the lie which has been perpetuated by NVB that there are two environments. SVB, however, teaches you that there is only one environment. Thus, SVB considers private speech as a subset of your public speech. It is absolutely astounding behaviorists aren’t endorsing this more often, as the separation of our private speech from our public speech is the proverbial elephant in the room of human interaction. Freud with his free association technique comes closer to addressing the SVB/NVB distinction than Skinner, who as we all know focused on operant conditioning.

December 4, 2016

December 4, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my twenty-eight response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” by J. Panksepp (2011). As I want the reader to be introduced to the work of this extraordinary researcher, I use big portions of his paper to illustrate why we need the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Panksepp is not listened to by other neuroscientists and his research isn’t broadly known or taught due to how we talk. NVB impairs human progress and only SVB can enhance it. This will be my last response to his paper for now. May be later I will respond to the rest of his paper.

“Are the various affects—diverse feelings of positive and negative valences (‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings in the vernacular)—identical across species? Of course not! Evolution persistently generates abundant differences, but always on top of conserved-homologous foundational principles at genetic, neural and primal psychological levels. Natural selection is adept at constructing vast diversities of forms and functions with profound similarities in underlying controls. Within the evolved BrainMind, the potentials for variety get ever greater as one ascends the various levels of control, with perhaps the greatest species variability in neocortical specializations, most of which are developmentally/ epigenetically created, even if they exhibit very high location concordance in the neocortex (from auditory to speech cortices so to speak). Those cross-species standard patterns are probably dictated by genetic controls that promote subcortical systems to innervate the nearest cortical regions—surely an energetically efficient strategy for brain construction. There need be no intrinsic cortical specializations before such genetically specialized innervations into what is initially general-purpose “computational” space (aka, neocortex).” SVB stimulates “neocortical specializations” from “auditory to speech cortices so to speak”. SVB activates our brains. The NVB speaker cannot properly stimulate our brain.