April 18, 2015

April 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Mankind’s problems are caused by how we talk. Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) simply means that we are talking with each other, but in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) we don’t know we are merely pretending to be talking. We are all part of the problem as long as we are not part of the solution. The problem is NVB and the solution is SVB. In SVB, we agree we have SVB, but in NVB we can’t even agree that we have NVB. In NVB the speaker is dismissive and inconsiderate about his or her effect on the listener. 

The reason why in NVB the speaker is not attuned with the listener is threefold: 1) The NVB speaker is unconscious about his or her sound, that is, the raw sensation hearing response of the speaker’s sound is not chained with hearing-awareness responses. Although the speaker’s tone of voice can be moderated, he or she continues to produce NVB as his or her emphasis is on what he or she is saying. Thus, in NVB the speaker ‘fixates on words’. 2) As a result of the inaccurate, agential verbal descriptions that prevent correspondence between verbal and nonverbal expression, the NVB speaker verbally separates from the raw sensation hearing responses, which he or she unconsciously, non-verbally experiences. In other words, the NVB speaker is involved in a struggle between what and how he or she says something. It may take many forms, but ultimately the NVB speaker always struggles for the attention of the listener. 3) As the NVB speaker is not listening to him or herself, it is more difficult for the the listener to mediate the speaker. He or she is not allowed to express the aversive effects of being the means to the speaker’s end. In NVB the listener is expected to be attuned to the speaker. This unconscious, mechanical, hierarchical, forceful, unsophisticated process involves outward orientation of the speaker and the listener, which establishes and guarantees the speaker’s dominance. In other words, in NVB, listening to others and making others listen to us, is more considered to be important than listening to ourselves. As the speaker is presumably more important than the listener, all the communicators in NVB remain outward-oriented. 

 

I have observed and verified together with thousands of individuals from all walks of life, for more than 30 years, thousands of times, that these three habits: 1) fixation on words, 2) struggle for attention and 3) outward orientation, change the way we sound. Only in SVB we talk with our natural sound. I have also discovered radical behaviorism, which validates SVB and NVB. Without his environmental science of verbal behavior, we will never be able to address and overcome our gigantic communication problems. 

SVB is the Holy Grail of human interaction. I am hopeful about the many who have already come to know about. As time goes by more and more people will learn to discriminate between SVB and NVB. I have successfully taught it and people have learned it. They too can teach it and implement it. We need to recondition our neural structure. Our current physiology, which mostly mediates NVB, can and will be changed by SVB. As a result of SVB we will acquire new covert and overt behavior. Moreover, we will be able to take note of this while we talk and acknowledge that “current stimuli evoke and that current neural structures mediate” (Ledoux, 2014, p. 483). SVB becomes possible when spoken communication is identified as our dependent variable and the sound of our own voice is the independent variable.

Individuals who have experimented with SVB find out they already know, due to their history of conditioning, there is a great difference between SVB and NVB. Those who didn’t want to experiment were not inclined to it as they were lacking the necessary history of conditioning. Only those who, due to their already high rates of SVB can recognize the great difference between SVB and NVB. They already know and they can teach those who, due to their high rates of NVB are incapable of acknowledging this major difference. Thus, only those with the appropriate behavioral history of reinforcement are capable of producing by how they speak the refined neural behavior in others which is needed for recognizing the stimulus indications of the human voice.

One cannot recognize the stimulus implications of someone else’s voice as long as one remains unaware of one’s own voice. Misunderstandings result from our lack of ‘self’-listening, that is, from the speaker’s inability or rather his or her unfamiliarity with the possibility of listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. Awareness of our own sound while we speak requires embodied covert hearing behavior, which evokes our body’s mediation of a covert observing response. However, such embodied covert hearing behavior is only possible in the absence of aversive stimulation. In other words, we only embody our sound when we feel completely safe and at ease. Unfortunately, this is seldom deliberately achieved while we speak and that is why most of our conversations perpetuate NVB. As long as the speaker’s covert observing response, which identifies whether one’s own voice is aversive or automatically reinforcing, only leads to a covert response and not to an overt response, the NVB speaker will inadvertently continue with his or her NVB. However, when  the speaker's covert observing response can be expressed overtly, he or she will produce SVB. Thus, only in SVB the speaker is a conscious speaker.   

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).