April 17, 2015

April 17, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

When a person listens to him or herself while he or she speaks, he or she most probably does something that he or she usually doesn’t do. Most of us don’t listen to ourselves while we speak and have never done it. Our lack of self-observation or the fact that we act unconsciously, is a function of a way of interacting in which speakers don't listen to themselves while they speak. The reason for a person to listen to him or her self while he or she speaks, could be this writing or someone who instructs him or her. In other words, there has to be a stimulus to evoke that person’s overt behavior. Nothing is happening magically by itself. There is always a reason why behavior occurs. 

People are uncomfortable with radical behaviorism’s determinism, because they believe in a self, which supposedly miraculously and spontaneously causes their behavior. This view causes nothing but problems. However, the instruction ‘listen to yourself while you speak’ still has the word 'self' in it. Let’s break down this behavior in behavioral terminology. As we I stated, these words, which also can be spoken, are stimuli. The reader sees these stimuli with his or her eyes or hears them if they are spoken with his or her ears. When we leave out the unscientific, imaginary concept known as 'self', we begin to pay attention to how our environment affects our nervous system. When I say ‘our’ environment or ‘our’ nervous system, I am not advocating for an updated version of ‘our’ outdated 'self'. To the contrary, I am addressing what is the same for all of us; our bodies are affected by, interacting with and adjusting to our environments. Even what we call our reflexes have great variability. 

 

For instance, these words cannot be read in the dark. Our pupils adjust to the amount of light. Although they will reflexively respond when we go in or out of the cinema, our pupils become smaller when exposed to large amounts of light and bigger when exposed to small amounts of light. Only if the light reaches a certain threshold are we able to read these words. To produce the vision responses we call reading light stimuli must impinge on photo-receptors. Without these kind of light stimuli there can be no seeing, which makes reading possible. As we can see from this example, this has nothing to do with any one person in particular.

Going back to our example of listening to ourselves while we speak, we are talking about a person’s ability to hear his or her own sound, while he or she speaks. In the same way that a person can hear the sound of someone else, he or she can also hear his or her own sound. Remember, there is no 'self' is involved in the feedback loop by means of which an organism interacts with and adjusts to his or her environment. As stated in the example of light being the necessary condition for reading, the fact that something is visible is not sufficient for reading. In other words, the nonverbal raw sensation behavior of seeing can be shaped into reading behavior only when the light is turned on more often. Also, both nonverbal and verbal instructions must be given for reading behavior to be conditioned. A person, who listens to him or herself, while he or she speaks, can do so without reading. However, reading words like these can help a person to listen to him or herself. If these words are read out loud, a sound will be heard. Such hearing is nonverbal, regardless of what these words mean.

As we are usually not listening to ourselves and as no one has emphasized our need to be able to listen to ourselves, we engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) most of the time. Once we listen to ourselves, it becomes apparent that Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) only seemed to be impossible because we were not listening to ourselves. In SVB we produce different stimulus products than in NVB. In SVB the nonverbal stimulus products that are produced by the sound of our voice evoke verbal behavior reports about these stimulus products of the speaker. Under such circumstances the speaker will be aware of him or herself that he or she is speaking.

Although the response products, produced in SVB by the speaker can be heard by others, the speaker, as a public of one, is now aware of his or her own voice. Indeed, in SVB we become like a musician, whose hearing continues to be shaped by the quality of the sound which he or she is producing. Moreover, the improvement of our sound, which comes about by listening to ourselves while we speak, changes our neural behavior and results in what we ordinarily call ‘self-awareness’. Verbal descriptions which are functionally related to positive nonverbal experiences are different from the verbal descriptions which are functionally related to negative nonverbal experiences. When all the speakers in a consversation listen to themselves while they speak, it becomes clear that we have all had past-experiences of self-awareness, but we were unable to refine or continue these experiences. Listening to ourselves while we speak creates the contingency in which we achieve what Colwyn Trevarthen calls “communicative musicality” (2008).

April 16, 2015

April 16, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) alter our nervous system. These neural changes, which make us mediate behavior differently, happen because of the functional effects of stimuli: our voices. However, in SVB we are conscious of our voice, but in NVB we remain unconscious about our sound. Stated differently, in SVB we are overt about how we sound, but in NVB, we are covert about it. In other words, we will continue to have NVB as long as we don’t talk about how we sound. 

We must differentiate between respondent hearing and operant hearing. During the preverbal stages of development, unconditioned stimulus energies at the baby’s phono-receptors in his or her ears produced by the mother’s voice, elicit unconscious hearing as raw sensations. This is unconditioned respondent neural hearing behavior. Conditioned hearing happens because other stimuli occur together with this unconditioned stimulus. After the mother’s voice has become paired with food, attention and comfort, these stimuli elicit conditioned hearing responses in the baby. And, the baby at some point starts to speak when the mother’s voice is paired with words. 

  

I will now turn to the covert and overt aspects of operant hearing. Covert operant hearing can be a response which is evoked by someone’s voice, by an overt antecedent stimulus, but it can also be a response to a previous covert antecedent response. In the former, the listener is listening to the speaker, but in the latter, the listener is not listening to the speaker, but to him or to herself. The distinction is crucially important because during such covert hearing we neither talk about what we have heard overtly nor covertly.

Although in overt operant hearing we can talk about what we have heard overtly as well as covertly, we usually don’t so. In most of our conversations private speech is pushed out by and abandoned in favor of public speech. Thus, when we can only talk about what we hear overtly, we are bound to engage in NVB. If, on the other hand, we can talk about what we hear covertly, we are bound to have SVB and we will be listening better to each other overtly. Stated differently, we don’t and we can’t have SVB as long as what we say to ourselves covertly cannot be expressed overtly. Furthermore, overt hearing can be improved by covert hearing. That is, each time we turn our conversation to what we hear covertly, our overt hearing becomes better.

Another way of saying this is covert hearing includes overt hearing, but overt hearing excludes covert hearing. Everybody has heard the overt complaint that we should and could do a better job at listening to each other, that is, by overt hearing. However, this emphasis on overt hearing hasn’t changed our behavior, because it excluded covert hearing. 

The NVB speaker elicits overt hearing in the listener. When the speaker, with his or her sound, controls the listener behavior with an aversive contingency, the listener is prevented from covert hearing. When uni-directional overt ‘communication’ is demanded by the speaker, the listener is pretty much forced to disconnect from his or her own covert private speech. Although this covert disconnect causes many overt disruptions, we are conditioned by NVB to ignore and punish such effects. Indeed, we have learned to punish and blame ourselves. Thus, private speech is alienated from our public speech. 

By reversing the split between our private speech and public speech, we accomplish SVB. By moving away, while we speak, from overt hearing to covert hearing and by making overt what we covertly hear, we can finally overtly hear what we have been saying to ourselves covertly.

Skinner explained consciousness as “seeing that we are seeing” and called this “conscious seeing” (1963). I suggest that consciousness is 'hearing that we are listening." Like seeing, hearing is made possible by the operant contingencies of a verbal community, which conditions unconscious hearing responses as well as what we say about what we hear. Initially, what we hear elicits raw sensation, covert, unconscious hearing. From our verbal community we learn to listen, talk, write and read; we become conscious about what started out as an unconscious experience. Another way of referring to this is that we transition from nonverbal to verbal behavior. 

Since we are born as nonverbal organisms, our listening behavior develops first and forms the foundation from which we become verbal. To ‘hear that we are listening’ and to ‘hear consciously’ requires that we pay attention to our sound while we speak. Since we seldom do that and at best have only experienced this momentarily and accidentally, we are mostly unconscious while we are speaking. In most conversations speakers don’t pay attention to how they sound, but they demand that others to pay attention to them.

When we speak, we produce sound. Vocal behavior preceded vocal verbal behavior ontogenetically and phylogenetically. In other words, vocal behavior goes back a much longer time into our evolutionary history than our vocal verbal behavior. Our survival depended on hearing and responding to the vocalizations from our conspecifics. There was no need to be conscious about raw sensation vocal behavior, because it would instantly elicit the adaptive autonomic response. It should be apparent from this example that our neural behavior never produced our hearing response, but always was and still is that hearing response. This neurobiological fact is not changed by the arrival of language, due to which we became capable of describing our reflexive vocal response and became conscious of it. However, only to the extent that our descriptions are accurate can we become conscious communicators. Stated differently, only our inaccurate descriptions ignore the eliciting effects which are created by our raw sensation vocal behavior. 

Although we have been conditioned by inaccurate descriptions of our vocal verbal behavior, that is, by NVB, our bodies haven’t changed that much and  respond quite naturally to accurate descriptions. Obviously, such descriptions describe danger as dangerous and safety as safe. Danger is still felt by most of us as danger and safety is still felt by us as safe. Once we have the distinction correct between SVB and NVB, we recognize how much so-called communication is still NVB, because it is based on threat and intimidation. Only because we haven’t had ongoing SVB and because we keep having instances of NVB, we consider the description of consciousness and the neural basis for it, to be separate from consciousness itself.

April 15, 2015

April 15, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

I was wearing black clothes to class yesterday night and my lecture was powerful. I was well-prepared to speak on Social Psychology and we covered a lot of ground. I spoke of various researchers, such as Dweck, Ash, James, Milgram and Zimbardo and the class was responding positively and engaged. It was noticeable that for many students it has become easier to talk. Many comments were made which added lively examples of what was addressed by me in the lecture. This dynamic going back and forth between the class and me was enjoyable and the time went by very fast.

I just woke up from a dream in which I was talking with a guru. I had been listening to him for quite some time. Like me, yesterday night, he was on fire and he was making everybody laugh. Because he had broken out of some pattern of formality, I showed him my gratitude by thanking him and by saying “I love it when you speak like that.” For what seemed minutes, I sat there silently in front of him, my hands folded, my eyes closed, my head bend down, all the way to my stomach. Then, I woke up from this dream and I realized that I had been dreaming about my own lecture. 

As this writing about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) describes the events of my life as a psychology instructor at Butte College, my neural structure is continuously changed by the conditioning processes it mediates. In ordinary language we call it ‘practice’, but in behaviorology, the natural science of human behavior, we avoid such agential words, because they don’t explain anything. There is no self, who is doing the practice, but there are only stimuli, for instance, the students in my class or the information from the textbook, who affect primarily my phono-receptors and my light-receptors. 

Actually, it makes no sense to talk about my phono-receptors or my light-receptors, because anyone only mediates a response to the extent that receptors are working properly, that is, to the extent that their nervous system is or was conditioned by previous stimuli. Mediation, the process in which, after a threshold has been reached, the receptor transduces energy into nerve impulses, is the same for everyone. It requires SVB, however, to wrap our ‘minds’ around the often overlooked fact that “A transduced energy transfer to neural structures of any sense mode can function as an eliciting or evocative stimulus” (italics added) (Ledoux, 2014). In other words, one response can elicit or evoke another response or a whole chain of responses. 

These are referred to as behavior-behavior relations and play a fundamental role in learning and consciousness. My success as an instructor depends on what is learned from the feedback that is received from my students. It is not about me doing the receiving or the learning. My ability to teach, to affect change and to stimulate learning, depends on whether I am learning. When I receive reinforcement from my students this means I am getting better at teaching. “The explanation for why the more skillful performance occurs, however, resides not in the improved structure but with the stimuli that evoke the performance and the reinforcers that the performance produces, reinforcers that improve the structure” (Ledoux, 2014, p.479).  

April 13, 2015

April 13, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

My wife and I worked very hard in our yard yesterday and things are finally beginning to come together. I wheel barreled in a lot of gravel, which is now covering the ground. We made a nice place to sit and got ourselves two blue comfortable chairs. Also, I made a little bridge that crosses the creek bed. It was quite an ordeal to saw that wood, because my saw was blunt. We need to get a new one. I asked the neighbor’s saw and got it done. The bridge still needs to be stabilized. Our gardener can get us some free bigger rocks from somewhere. That would look great. We are going to plant some grasses, a tree, a bush and some agaves. 

When Bonnie disagrees with me, she raises her voice and speaks in a tone I don’t like. Since we have to decide many things together about our garden, we have moments of irritation. This is part of doing something together. Our disagreements are always settled quickly. Under such circumstances instances of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) are replaced by instances of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). I enjoy doing projects with her and it is such a pleasure to see her work at the vegetable garden. She planted tomatoes, eggplant, okra, basil, squash and cantaloupe. She is careful and precise, but sometimes she is wrong or refuses to see to see things my way. I have given in to her many times, but with some things I want to have my way. She first didn’t want to have agaves, but after repeated requests consented to have them. There are still some plants and grasses that need to be bought and planted, but the big rearrangements of the yard have all been done. It looks beautiful.

Working in the yard, evening out and raking gravel and sawing wood for the bridge, are neuromuscular behaviors, but thinking about Bonnie, sometimes upset about her demanding ways, is neural behavior. Thus, consciousness is considered by behaviorologists as neural behavior. A person doesn’t do anything physical while being conscious. To be conscious, our body doesn’t need to be involved in action and no neuromuscular behavior is needed.

Writing is a public response, but thoughts that precede this writing are a private response. Reporting these responses involves overt verbal behavior. Although only I currently have access to this writing, in principle, many may have access to it. However, only I can have access to my thoughts, that is, only a public of one has access to stimuli of private speech. While learning about SVB it is important that we don’t revert to the use of agential terms.


We are talking about an auditory stimulus, a sound, someone’s voice, “a form of energy that affects our phonoreceptors, which produce aural responses, what, in agential terms, we call hearing” (Ledoux, 2014). Before someone’s sound is affecting us, that is, “before a stimulus energy trace can affect a receptor, the energy trace must reach the necessary physiological threshold” (Ledoux, 2014). Sometimes we don’t hear someone, because they don’t talk loud enough. In that case, the stimulus can’t affect the receptor, as it is not strong enough to reach the threshold. At other times, we don’t hear someone, because we are not consciously listening. We are not paying attention to how they sound as our attention is only going to what they are saying. In the latter, a gating-mechanism seems to be at work. 

The person has the ability to perceive someone’s sound, but only if he or she pays attention to how this person sounds rather than to what this person is saying. Once this shift from what the person is saying to how the person sounds, which, by the way, both are overt responses, has been made, overt responses can and will be made by such a person, which involve few covert responses. In other words, in SVB, the conversation will be under stimulus control of the sound of our voice. You can compare it to driving which is under stimulus control of what is seen along the road. We don’t need to pay conscious attention to each of these stimuli as we habitually drive from point A to point B. Often we don’t even realize that we drove, because we were listening to the radio or we were having all sorts of thoughts. 

Driving safely, without having to consciously pay attention, is possible because our nonverbal driving behavior is under stimulus control of what we see. Our driving requires neither covert nor overt verbal behavior. A similar nonverbal process is possible when our vocal verbal behavior is under direct stimulus control of how we sound. In that case, it is because we can talk without having private speech that we will be able to have a good conversation. When our driving behavior is not under direct stimulus control of our seeing behavior, we would not be able to drive very safely. Our daydreaming or private speech will then be so distracting that it leads to accidents. Similarly, if during our vocal verbal behavior, that is, during Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), our talking is not and cannot be under direct stimulus control our sound, all sorts of ‘accidents’ may happen and we will be distracted.

In NVB, in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency, the speaker’s voice causes raw-sensation behavior in the listener. This “first behavior” is a “covert behavior, in a chain that includes covert and then overt behavior” (Ledoux, 2014). It is important to understand here that raw-sensation behavior is elicited when a stimulus affects a receptor. If there is little or no verbal report involved, respondent sensory perception of reality is merely a simple awareness behavior. Only during SVB can we describe and express overtly and correctly the direct stimulus control exerted by listening behavior over our speaking behavior. 

What happens when auditory stimuli affect phono-receptors while we speak is comparable to what happens when visual stimuli affect photo-receptors while we drive. As long as driving behavior is under direct discriminative control of what we see, we don’t need to see what we see consciously. However, after we have been stopped by the police, because we broke the speed limit and had to show our papers and got a ticket, we will drive more consciously. Temporarily, our covert verbal behavior takes the place of direct stimulus control and we make sure that we don’t speed anymore. In a similar fashion, we can talk without having to think much about it, as long as we are not called out for anything that we say. When someone is disagreeing with us, rejecting us and making us stop talking, our attention suddenly shifts from nonverbal well-being to verbal stress. Initially, we were fine just talking and there was no need to be anxious or upset about the verbal, because we agreed and we understood, but because of NVB, we were disconnecting from the nonverbal and becoming imprisoned by the verbal.