October 20, 2014

October 20, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

This writer had a productive weekend: he made holders for the hoses in the front and the back yard, he spread his Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)message at the Farmer’s Market, he  tilted the soil, cleaned out the garage, went swimming, threw away a bunch of old books and had a very good sleep. Moreover, these activities got him approval from his wife, with whom he went on an early morning hike. 

On top of all that, this writer booked another free seminar at the Chico Branch Library of Butte County on Sunday, November 30, for which he produced a well-written invitation. This writer’s language has much improved. It will be the last time he uses the Library’s Public Room, because after that, in the new-year, he intends to organize his seminars on a bi-weekly basis at his own home.

  

The cleaning out of the garage made enough room to comfortably sit there. He will  use this new space to work on making and scoring quizzes. The books he hasn’t thrown away are now nicely put on shelves. It is a pleasant feeling to have access to the old stuff, which previously was sitting in boxes. He has many old journals and sometimes reads in them. How things are now, is explained by his writings from many years ago. 

After professor Ledoux will retire, Behaviorology most likely will not be represented academically anymore. This writer feels strengthened in spreading the natural science of human behavior, viva voce, the way it was, according to him, supposed to be spread, by word of mouth. SVB explains why Behaviorology was not accepted: we need to become scientific about the way in which we talk. Unfortunately, Ledoux is not open to this and declined this writer's invitation to explore this with him.

It is amazing how knowledge at some point of time is available, but at another point of time seems to have completely vanished. This happens at an individual as well as at a societal level. People get drunk and then they sober up and find that reality is still there waiting to be acknowledged. Although our sciences have spurred great innovations, they didn’t improve our human relationships. The reason for this is simple and straight forward: we didn’t apply science to how we communicate. Only in SVB do the communicators verify if what they say makes sense to others.

October 19, 2014

Sunday November 30, 2014, from 1:00pm to 5:00pm

Free Seminar:

Welcome To Sound Verbal Behavior

With Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Chico Branch of the Butte County Library,

1108 Sherman Avenue, Chico CA 95926

According to the natural science of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), you can say for yourself if it works or not. Once you begin to listen to your own voice while you speak, one of two things is predicted to happen: you like what you hear or you don’t like it. If you like your own sound, you are producing SVB, but, if you don’t like what you hear, you produce Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). As long as you don’t feel good about your own sound while you speak, you produce a sound which elicits a stressed, anxious, angered, frustrated, distracted or threatened response in others. Elicitation refers to respondent behavior, which is innate. The fight, flight or freeze responses, which are characteristic for NVB, are caused by the sound of our voice, which functions as an aversive stimulus. As reflexive behaviors predate the arrival of language, which is a recent event in our evolutionary history, when these autonomic responses release cascades of neurotransmitters, they make social engagement impossible. 

 

It goes without saying or, rather, it will be, based on experimental evidence, apparent to most of us, that sound has always been the mechanism by means of which we communicate our relative sense of safety and well-being with one another. By focusing on how we sound, we can effortlessly improve our spoken communication. Our sound is produced and listened to in the here and now. In SVB, we become conscious or meditative communicators. However, the opposite is equally true: due to NVB we have remained unconscious mechanical communicators. SVB is other-evident as well as self-evident, as we experience what is outside and inside of our skin as one environment. During SVB there is alignment of verbal and nonverbal expression and what we say is made clear and supported by how we say it. SVB is an operant behavior, which can only be acquired due to the safety, care and comfort provided by our environment. Even if we weren’t conditioned to have high rates of SVB, we can still reliably increase our rates of SVB and simultaneously decrease our rates NVB responding. The contingencies of reinforcement for SVB and NVB are mutually exclusive. 

 

Another way of describing NVB and SVB is that in the former we talk at each other, but in the latter we begin to talk with each other. Surely, NVB is uni-directional and SVB is bi-directional; in SVB we take turns being a speaker and a listener, but in NVB we don’t take turns, because we can’t. Thus, SVB is a listener’s or mediator’s perspective of the speaker or the verbalizer. In NVB, mediators fixate on the verbalizer and other-listening excludes self-listening. Only in SVB do we really listen to each other because we listen to ourselves. Ironically, in NVB we coerce others to listen to us, but we don’t listen to ourselves. Bring friends and family, come in time and stay for the whole duration of the seminar so that you can reap the maximum benefits from this life-and-relationship altering, verifiable scientific process. 

Kind greetings,

Maximus

October 18, 2014

October 18, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader,

 

This writer received an email from the behaviorologist Stephen Ledoux, whose book “Running Out Of Time” he is currently reading. Ledoux is involved in what may be his final battle, which he is unlikely to win. Since he is about to retire, he hopes that his behaviorology courses will be continued by psychologists, but as most of them  believe in the agential causation of behavior, the chances that that will happen are slim. This writer believes Ledoux is right: only behaviorologists can teach behaviorology courses. It must be painful to see his life’s work, a total of ten behaviorology courses, be voted out politically. Yet, this is the unscientific world we live in, in which the contingencies for Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) are much more successful than the contingencies for Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). 

According to this writer, however, the supremacy of the contingencies for NVB will not last forever. He has all the proof that, if given the choice, students will almost unanimously choose for the contingencies that make SVB possible. Many of his students have said that a course in SVB should be mandatory for all students. 

The fact that academia hasn’t woken up to SVB doesn’t surprise this writer. When he first read about the science of environment-behavior controlling relations, he  immediately knew it couldn't work as long as our way of talking is not under discriminative control of behaviorology. With all respect for the hard work done by many behaviorologists and behaviorists, their way of talking, like everyone else’s way of talking, is still based on the contingencies for NVB. 

Ledoux's claim “Behaviorology is neither a part of, nor related in any meaningful way to, psychology of any kind!” (p. 182) (Ledoux, 2014), is necessary, but not sufficient to establish a natural science of human behavior. Since everyone in academia is busy with written, but not with spoken words, it hasn’t yet occurred to anyone that to become scientific about human behavior, we need an entirely new way of interacting. This writer’s view that we must talk is vindicated by this temporary defeat of behaviorology. For all their scientific rigor, behaviorologists haven’t analyzed their own adherence to the written word, which has strengthened instead of weakened the contingencies for NVB.

October 17, 2014

October 17, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

This writer is an Associate Faculty at Butte College. He teaches an entry level psychology course called Principles of Psychology. He enjoys teaching since this gives him the opportunity to interact with students and to experiment. One of his experiments is giving students the chance to gain extra credit points by writing a two page thought paper. The paper starts with the verbal instruction “When I listen to the sound of my voice while I speak, then…..” The students like to do this assignment and write the most wonderful papers one can imagine. 

This writer just finished reading a beautiful paper that was written by one of his students. It is so reinforcing to read these papers, because students validate in them so elegantly and elaborately both the workings and the existence of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) as well as Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

The student whose paper this writer just read started out by saying that he is not overly fond of his own voice. In the second sentence, however, he stated that as a child, he was not allowed speak, he was told to keep quiet and that what he said didn’t matter. This sums up this writer’s own behavioral history, which led him to discover SVB. As the student began to listen to himself while he speaks, he realized that listening to his voice made him uncomfortable. It is significant this would be the first thing that he noticed. What is apparent from such a sad, but common statement is that this person was rejected and has been rejecting himself. Oddly, he was so used to rejecting himself that, until he did this exercise, it had never occurred to him that he didn’t like his own voice, let alone, question why that might be the case.  Due to the environmental support which he and other students received from this writer in class, he was able recognize that it was actually quite strange that he didn’t like to hear his own voice. It didn’t take long for him to say to himself that as a child, he was often not allowed to speak and hear himself. What he was saying, and what many others have been saying, was that he was made to listen to others, while he was not allowed to listen to himself. The production of his own sound was not allowed. He believed that nothing he said was worth to be listened to. 

This writer has read hundreds of versions of a similar behavioral history. People continue to engage in NVB because they were conditioned to listen to others and not to themselves. In each paper that was written by this writer's students one can read the same process. First, they don't like to listen to themselves, they fear listening to themselves, they dread listening to themselves, but, because of this assignment, which they must do alone, they listen to themselves and begin to question why it is so strange or hard to listen to themselves? Once this question has been formulated the answer comes out and they let themselves know about how they were coerced to listen to others. Moreover, as they begin to listen to themselves, they fully enjoy doing this and they realize that they have always secretively enjoyed this already.    

October 16, 2014

October 16, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

It dawned on this writer recently that mankind as a whole hasn’t yet become truly verbal. We use words, but how do we speak? With Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) as our main way of communicating, we don’t embody our language. We can’t “find our voice”, let alone “speak with one voice”, as long as the sound of our voice doesn’t get our attention. Many years ago, when this writer first discovered the importance of self-listening, he foresaw that what he now calls Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), would only spread by word of mouth.This writing is not going to change that.

Expressions as “my word of honor”, “words are cheap”, “I’ll give you my word”, “actions speak louder than words”, “he didn’t keep his word” or “he broke his word”, refer to how we sound. Ancient philosophers, like Plato, knew what many seem to have forgotten today: there is a connection between sound and meaning. 

We speak of trust or lack of trust when we say “take my word for it” or “these are empty words.” When we are taking an oath, we swear to speak the truth. And, his relationship is meaningful because “he felt moved by what she said” although “it took a while for the words to sink in.” After his story “had struck a chord” they  harmonized and resonated together. When we say “sounds good to me”, we agree. 

It is no coincidence that NVB is everywhere. Only once in blue moon are we allowed to say to each other “it’s not what you say, but how you say it!” Because we are not used it, we don’t tolerate feedback from others about how we speak.  Consequently, we basically don’t care at all about how we sound and most of our interactions just sound terrible. If it looks and feels bad, if it sounds cold, phony, pompous, pushy, pretentious,  contrived, guarded, saintly, wordy, edgy, arrogant and incendiary, it isn’t communication, but it is domination, exploitation, humiliation, alienation, dissociation, distraction and fabrication. During SVB, by contrast, we sound good, we feel good and we communicate in an effortless manner. We haven’t had very much SVB, because we haven’t been taught to be attentive to how we sound while we talk. The only way in which we are going to achieve, maintain and increase SVB is by listening to ourselves while we speak.