May 23, 2015

May 23, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Readers, 

 

One of my students, who is suffering from depression, wrote in a two-page paper (which had to start with the sentence: “When I listen to the sound of my voice then…. “), that he didn’t like to listen to the sound of his voice, because he was afraid when others hear him they will not be flattered by it. In other words, he is not listening to himself, but he is imagining how others are hearing and judging him. Interestingly, he also mentions, he doesn’t like his own sound, because other people sound smarter than him. He doesn’t talk about what they say, but he refers to how they sound. This person has hardly said anything in class during this semester, but he once explained to me that he is struggling with fear for embarrassment and social rejection. 

Because of this extra credit assignment, he was speaking and listening to himself, even though he told himself that he didn’t like what he heard and as a result doesn’t dare to say much. As a consequence, he discovered and explored that his private speech consisted of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which is the vocal verbal behavior in which the speaker (in this case himself) controls the behavior of the listener (also himself) with a negative contingency. 

It is important that we learn from this depressed person that he was really not listening to himself, because he had not been speaking. He was only able to listen to himself again after he began to speak, and, most importantly, after he began to speak with himself. While speaking with others would most likely not result in him being able to listen to himself, speaking with himself made him listen to himself, for the first time. As he continues to speak about the fact that he experiences these anxieties, he finds, to his surprise, that at times, he suddenly feels good. Remarkably, he states he has a voice of his own and then discovers and explores Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the vocal verbal behavior in which the speaker (he himself) controls the behavior of the listener (also himself) with an appetitive stimulus. Instantaneously, he gains a sense of control and proudly declares he doesn’t need others to speak for him, because he can speak for himself, but only if he wants to. This positive self-talk, which needs to be further increased, is only possible however, because he is no longer busy with how others are hearing him.

Stated differently, he is no longer listening to himself as if he is listening to someone else. He is now listening to himself and recognizes that he is listening to himself, that is, he is conscious that he is listening to himself and that the speaker and the listener are one and the same person and that he is that one person. When he was not listening to himself, as he didn’t speak, he retreated non-verbally into listening, which was based on negative self-talk, which contrasted people who speak, as sounding good, with his own lack of speech, as sounding bad. Moreover, not only did others sound better, because they talked, they were supposedly smarter, which made him feel even dumber. 

Even though in this case the speaker and the listener are initially connecting because of NVB, this immediately switches to SVB. One could say that the way “in” was the same as the way “out,” that is, lack of self-listening created and maintained an imaginary split between the speaker and the listener, which gave rise to a self-defeating belief in an inner self. As self-listening is restored, due to a writing assignment which involves listening to oneself, the muted speaker comes back alive again, is acknowledged and validated. Suddenly, the student realizes it can go both ways, meaning, he seemingly sounds terrible as long as he is not saying anything, but he actually likes his own voice, when he again says something and attentively listens to it.

Once he is having the choice to be with or without a voice, he chooses to have his own voice, regardless of how it sounds. The happiness that he can finally speak out and listen to himself is more important than the fact that he didn’t like his voice. He is so happy to have a voice that he sounds good. Now he appreciates his voice even when it doesn’t sound good. He realizes that he can talk in spite of how he sounds. However, toward the end of his paper, his self-listening is replaced by other-listening. He no longer listens to himself, but worries about how he will be able to continue this with others. His positive experience stood in a stark contrast with his long-held negative way of viewing himself. He would need more reinforcement to be able to continue. Especially, he needs verbal instruction to listen to himself, so he can stop trying to sound like how he imagines others might like him to sound. He dislikes his sound because of instructions that were given. Depression is only one of the many problems of our belief in an inner self. 

Our common belief in a behavior-causing self is deeply problematic. It is because of NVB that this fiction can and will continue. SVB, by contrast, is the only solution. Stated differently, NVB elicits emotional discomfort, which cannot be disssolved by knowledge. As the depressed student described, NVB is against knowledge, as certain circumstances are necessary for knowledge to be obtained. Knowledge of the natural world can only be obtained when our sensory neurons evoke rather than elicit the neural behaviors involved in learning. SVB reinforces positive emotions. NVB reinforces, exploits and perpetuates negative emotions; we are made to feel bad about ourselves and we are doing whatever we can to avoid that. 

 

Although we may not suffer from depression like this student, we all suffer all sorts of other negative consequences from how we talk with each other. As the example makes clear, the most problematic aspect about our common way of talking is of course how this makes us talk with ourselves or rather, how this prevents us from talking with ourselves. Belief in an inner behavior-causing agent is maintained by NVB. Our covert negative private speech is caused and maintained by overt, negative public speech. The idea that, something can be done, therapeutically, about negative covert speech, is a mentalistic notion in which we remain oblivious of the fact that private speech is a function of public speech, which continues unabated as long as we don’t turn our attention to it.

Rather than merely dealing with symptoms, we should attend to the actual causes of our problems. If we were really doing that, we would be no longer interested in our individual problems, but with the way of interacting which has caused these problems in the first place. Whether it is the negative private speech of this student, the suicidality of the bipolar patient, the guardedness of the paranoid schizophrenic, the history of the abusive father or the need of the addicted mother, we would be dealing not with our individual problems, but with how we all communicate. Rather than making it into someone’s personal problem, we would realize that these are all effects of NVB and can only be solved by more SVB. The increase of SVB is not going to depend on only a couple of people. If it is going to increase it is because millions of people are going to recognize how important our way of talking with each other really is.

May 22, 2015

May 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Today’s writing is my fifth response to “Behaviorism and the Stages of Scientific Activity” by J. Moore (2010). Although I tried to contact him, Moore has never even responded to me. Yet, he is the one who wrote “Radical behaviorism is concerned about talk of mental causes and dimensions because such talk is a product of nonscientific influences (underlining added).”  

May be it was because I was explaining myself in terms of having ‘meditative interaction’ in my previous writings? However, Moore’s written concern “about talk” is not the same as my involvement with real talk. This reminds me of the colloquial distinction between SVB and NVB. In the former people talk with each other, but in the latter, people talk at each other. Stated differently, SVB is bi-directional and NVB is uni-directional. It amazes me how often behaviorist writing, supposedly in an attempt to prevent “reification”, contain references to things said without giving consideration for the fact that these written “words can neither literally create nor change the nature of the things talked about.”

 

Scholarly emphasis on writing rather than on talking is based on the false assumption that studying what is written will change the way in which we talk. Sadly, Skinner’s project of “redefining psychology” was mainly about writing. He lamented the fact that the science of behavior “inherited a language so infused with metaphor and implication that it was frequently impossible merely to talk about behavior without raising the ghosts of dead systems. Worst of all, it carried on the practice of seeking solution for the problems of behavior elsewhere that in the behavior itself.” Although he argued in favor of a science “in which behavior was taken as a subject matter in its own right, as Watson (1878/1958) had earlier envisioned it”, he didn’t seek, like I do, solutions for how we talk “in the behavior itself.” To the contrary, Skinner himself urged the behaviorist to seek the “solution for the problems elsewhere”, that is, in their writings. Later in his career, Skinner stated “As a philosophy of a science of behavior, behaviorism calls for probably the most drastic change ever in our way of thinking about man (underlining added).” He didn’t say‘talking'!

What are the “methods and instruments needed in the study of behavior?” Are we prevented from advancing more rapidly toward them, as Skinner believed, because of “the diverting preoccupation with a supposed or real inner life?” Is mentalism, as Moore believes, a half-baked “third-stage verbal product”, which hasn’t “gone through developmental verbal processes associated with the first two stages?” We can use our vocal verbal behavior as our method and we must use our eyes and ears as instruments. Our “diverting preoccupation with an inner life” is not kept alive by cognitive science, but by our overemphasis on writing and reading. If we would decide to investigate talking while we talk, there would be no room for an imaginary inner agent. It is because we haven’t talked that this inner agent is still there. Really talking means: being without an inner agent. This is not esoteric, but scientific. Certainly “cognitive psychology is a great hoax and a fraud”, but regardless of that, most interaction is based on belief in the inner causation of behavior, that is, most talking is NVB. 

As a teacher, but also as a facilitator of hundreds of seminars, that is, as an experimenter, I have found that “the validation of the experiment is the change in the behavior of the individual subject, guided by principle or instruction.” My focus has been and continues to be “manipulations necessary to confirm the law.” Although SVB has been confirmed over and over again, I never get tired of it. I am aligned with Bacon, who stated “to know a cause is have the ability to produce an effect.” I happily consider myself “homo faber”, a “making human” rather than “homo sapiens”, a “thinking human.” As evidenced by my students, the SVB/NVB distinction is “practical, productive knowledge – how to control, make and remake the world.” Moreover, I feel at home in the USA because my technological theory is aligned with American culture. I continue a lineage of passionate behavioral engineers, who are into scientifically doing something to change the world into a better place. 

By instructing people to listen to themselves while they speak, I bring them “under control of variables and relations that participate in an event.” By doing so, “participants may better formulate and refine principles that inform the prediction and control of behavioral events.” The event I am talking about here is talking. People learn to discriminate the two subsets of vocal verbal behavior and the conditions in which these behaviors occur.

As with all behaviorisms, SVB is an inductive practice. “The inductive leap from particulars to universals” begins with the speaker’s verbal behavior and then it generalizes to the listener’s response. When it is pointed out to a speaker that he or she sounds a certain way, that is, when the listener becomes the speaker and then tells the other speaker how he or she is experiencing this speaker and how he or she is feeling about him or her, this is often, quite conveniently, pushed aside as “irrelevant or ad hominem.” The difference between SVB and NVB is mostly avoided in actual conversation, because, as Schoenfeld (1969) correctly described  “what is not often pointed out [in deductively arrived postulates] is to say where the axioms or postulates come from in the first place.”  Moreover, “to argue that only the ultimate correctness of the postulates is of interest, is to deny that human behavior is involved.” The difference between SVB and NVB is not theoretical, as it is about a functional relationship that involves the speaker and the listener. Once we explore SVB and NVB, we can no longer hide behind our unscientific, favorite, mentalistic postulates. 

SVB and NVB are “behavioral processes” which “are uniform across time and place.” These subsets of vocal verbal behavior are on the continuum of behavior with other species; there is a nonverbal version of SVB and NVB in nonhumans. Since our phylogenetic development makes our ontogenetic development (SVB and NVB), possible, it is important to recognize the environmental variables which effect how we talk. Development of scientific theory is essentially not very different from our everyday pragmatic efforts to make sense of our world. Our theory of reality is only as good as the extent to which we accurately measure the results of our actions. As we research SVB, it will become apparent that “better outcomes of events”, better results in our conversation, depends not on specific third-stage statements, but on whether SVB was able to continue. The verbal instructions given by the speaker involve appetitive stimulation of the listener, who as a speaker maintains SVB, by reinforcing the other speaker. In conclusion, NVB is my way or the highway, but in SVB everyone can be a speaker, who is reinforced by the fact that he or she is listening to him or herself, but who is also being listened to by others. It is reciprocal reinforcement that makes SVB possible and keeps it going.

May 21, 2015

May 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Today’s writing is my fourth response to “Behaviorism and the Stages of Scientific Activity” by J. Moore (2010). By reading and studying this paper, it became clear to me that my theory of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), unlike most mentalistic theories, has passed through three different developmental stages. It is true for SVB that “verbal processes at the earlier stages establish a large degree of stimulus control over verbal processes at the later stages.” My “theoretical verbal behavior” is parsimonious and not controlled by any “mischievous factors.” I am not using metaphors to make my point and if I do, I only do so to demonstrate how distracting they are and should be avoided In spite of rejection, my insistence on vocal verbal behavior, on talking, as well as my resistance against and my problems with, writing, protected me from falling victim to mentalism, even before I knew anything about behaviorism. Listening to one self while one speaks dislodges any false notion of having a self.

The fact that neither the speaker nor the listener has a behavior-causing inner self, is the most revolutionary characteristic about SVB and is also the reason why I have experienced so much rejection from others. However, those few people who, due to their own behavior history, were ready to engage in the conversation that dissolves any sense of self, they reinforced me. When I discovered SVB, I called it “Language Which Creates Space” as I was involved with people who practiced meditation. I was an oddball in the company of esoteric people, who didn’t want to talk with me. As long as we were meditating, things were fine, but when meditation came to an end and we were drinking tea, someone would say something I experienced as disturbing as it seemed to destroy the meditation. The moment someone opened their mouth we were back to square one and our usual arguments and petty talk would come right back. People reluctantly talked about ‘being in their mind’ and were supposedly in the process of ‘getting out of their mind.’ They all agreed that talking itself made us ‘identify with our mind’ and weren’t into it. 

Since I was, because of the family in which I grew up in, into talking, I was frustrated when the meditation would go away because people were talking or because they didn’t want to talk. My notion of meditation was that there must be a way of talking, which creates and maintains it, but my attempts failed and I only got into arguments. People were getting tired of me and I was getting tired of them and I was thrown out. I got frustrated as meditation was absent in my conversations with others. Alone and rejected, I began to talk out loud with myself. Because I had been trained as a classical tenor singer, I was used to listening to myself, but this time I was listening to the sound of my voice while I was speaking. At that time this was a totally new experience for me.

To my surprise, when I listened to the sound of my voice while I talked with myself about my depressing situation, I felt peaceful and calm. My attention for the sound of my voice made me aware of what and how I was talking. I was saying to myself: this is how I want to talk! I felt relieved and reassured that I was able to talk like this with others. All I needed to do was to listen to my voice while I speak. However, this turned out to be extremely difficult, even almost impossible. Again and again, I lost my calm voice and was speaking with a voice which sounded upset, agitated, frustrated, fearful and negative. I wanted to speak with my happy voice, with a sound which made me feel at ease, meditative and focused, but I lost it again and again and again. Each time this happened, I went back to my attic and tried to listen to myself and each time, I found back again the sound which made me completely quiet. 

One friend, who was willing to listen to me, let me explain how I wanted to talk with him. He liked it and encouraged me to continue with it. Because of him I got a couple people together with whom we explored the process of listening while we speak. In SVB each speaker is listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. In SVB the speaker is his or her own listener, but other listeners can also hear if and when the speaker is listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. When the speaker is no longer listening to him or herself, while he or she speaks, he or she is producing Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the speaker separates him or herself from the other communicators, who are his or her environment, by assuming the existence of an inner self. 

Being disconnected or isolated from others is a negative emotion and causes us to speak with a sound which is experienced the listener as an aversive stimulus. Oneness with the environment, by contrast, based on feelings of safety, well-being and support, makes us produce an appetitive sound, with which everyone agrees. When the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks, others agree with 100% inter-observer reliability that he or she is listening to him or herself while he or she speaks. Others feel the relaxation of the speaker when he or she produces SVB, but others also feel the sense of stress, anxiety and fear, when the speaker again produces NVB.

SVB is vocal verbal behavior which is no longer controlled by the mentalistic belief in a behavior-managing self. SVB makes us and keeps us conscious. NVB, on the other hand, makes us and keeps us unconscious and causes us to repeat verbal patterns, such as our belief in the inner causation of behavior, repeated in an automatic manner. NVB takes the life out of us and makes us talk in a mechanical, predetermined manner. SVB stimulates awareness and enables us to pay attention to whatever we focus our attention on, but NVB demands, holds and drains our attention and makes us feel depleted.

Our voice is the independent variable and what we say is the dependent variable; a change in our voice changes the conversation. Skinner wrote “When I said “explanation”, I simply meant the causal account. An explanation is the demonstration of a functional relationship between behavior and manipulable or controllable variables.”  SVB and NVB is not only “a system of behavior in terms of which the facts of science can be clearly stated”, it is also a system that can be tested experimentally. The fact that we haven’t done that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t do it. "Third-stage theorizing" doesn’t depend on anyone’s confirmation. Like Skinner, I say “my reinforcers were the discovery of uniformities, the ordering of confusing data, the resolution of puzzlement.” Most certainly, my theory of SVB doesn’t “include elements that are not expressed in the same terms and cannot be confirmed with the same methods of observation and analysis as the facts they are said to address.”

May 20, 2015

May 20, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Today’s writing is my third response to “Behaviorism and the Stages of Scientific Activity” by J. Moore (2010). I am well aware that it sounds pedantic to claim that we don’t know how to maintain Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), that is, scientific vocal verbal behavior. We have acquired scientific written verbal behavior, but in our way of talking we have yet to become scientific. Scientists and scholars continue to write and read about events they would much rather talk about. However, they have been unsuccessful in talking about it. Many books and papers would never have been written, if we could talk properly about the events that are written about. It is like the difference between texting versus calling someone. Sending a text message gives the texter/speaker, a sense of control over the behavior of the reader/listener and this is why people rather text each other than talk with each other. The same is true for writing books or papers. The authors, Skinner included, wish to stick to their talking points and only bring those across. As such they would like to claim something that cannot be refuted by any reader.

The forcefulness of an argument in a conversation is always accompanied by an aversively-sounding voice. Listeners want to escape from such a noxious stimulus, because it threatens them. Thus, in real conversation, a speaker’s speaking is only as good as a listener’s ability to hear and understand what the speaker is saying; reinforcement of the speaker depends on the listener.

Verbal behavior, as Skinner defined it, is “behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons” (Skinner, 1957)The fact that the writer wants to control the behavior of the reader or that the speaker wishes to control the behavior of the listener seems to oppose Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior. Skinner’s definition, which was further elaborated with the additional words that this other person, who reinforces the speaker “must be specifically trained to provide such reinforcement,” tells us that the slave is only capable of reinforcing the slave owner to the extent that he or she was specifically trained to provide such reinforcement. Let there be no mistake about this: the slave was beaten, tortured, humiliated, threatened etc. until he or she obeyed and mediated the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) of his or her master. 

Stated differently, the behavior of the slave owner didn’t lead to an emitted response, but to an elicited response, that is, it resulted in an increase of respondent behavior of the slave. Since the behavior of the slave owner is not operant behavior in the sense that it was reinforced by an emitted response of the slave, it shouldn’t be considered as verbal behavior. Moreover, since the slave is only to behave non-verbally, to do the work and not to behave verbally in any significant way, this slave owner’s way of talking is different from when he or she is talking with a family member. This example makes clear how the slave owner might have SVB with his wife and children, while having NVB with his or her slaves. Similarly, Nazi death camp guards were able to maintain normal family relations while gassing millions of Jews in the concentration camps during the Second World War in Germany. Since the behavior of the slave is respondent behavior and since the threat of the slave owner’s coercive behavior can only be decreased by the slave’s repeated slavish responses, this behavior of the slave is reinforced by negative reinforcement. It occurs because the aversive stimulus, the threat of the punishing presence of the slave owner, will be reduced once the slave exhibits his or her slavish behavior. Furthermore, the slave is likely to have this behavior more often in the future, because he or she wants to avoid or as much as possible remove any of these negative consequences. And, he or she wants to survive. 

Although perhaps less life threatening in everyday conversations, the NVB of the speaker elicits primarily respondent behavior in the listener. Only in SVB is the speaker reinforced by the mediating responses of the listener evoked by the speaker. Poincare (1913), who also had a big influence on Skinner’s way of thinking states “Experiment is the sole source of truth. It alone can teach us anything new. It alone can give us certainty….Merely to observe is not enough. We must use our observations and to do that we must generalize…The scientist must set in order. Science is build up with facts as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” The houses we built, the relationships we had, were based on NVB and just “heaps of stones”. Imaginary bridges, built with NVB, were doomed to collapse, because they couldn’t hold the traffic of so-called relationship, in which the speaker dominated, oppressed and exploited the listener.

Like Skinner, I plant my tongue in my cheek, because I “proceed in a rather Baconian fashion.” The SVB/NVB distinction doesn’t owe anything to any other theoretical approach, not even behaviorism. Behaviorism represents me and I am not needed to represent it. I  am satisfied and reinforced by “manipulating variables selected for study through a common sense exploration of the field.”

To engage in SVB is to experiment and will give the experimenter a certainty which could not have been obtained in any other way. Skinner who boldly stated “Behavior can only be satisfactorily understood by going beyond the facts themselves…Theories are based upon facts; they are statements about organizations of facts….With proper operational care they need nothing more than that.” In SVB, what we say matters – because   of how we say it. It is a spoken theory. Thus, SVB is not, “any explanation of an observed fact which appeals to events which take place somewhere else, at some other level of observation, described in different terms, and measured, if at all, in different dimensions.” Thus, SVB has nothing to do with written verbal behavior. Written theories which refer to events in “the real nervous system, the conceptual system, or the mind” have “led to the continued use of methods which should be abandoned.” Moreover, the small amount of talking that went into teaching these nonsensical theories “which have not stimulated good research on learning and misrepresented the facts to be accounted for” and “gave false assurances about the state of our knowledge”, was mainly based on NVB. SVB questions and debunks these theories. It is as if Skinner was speaking about SVB, when he stated “But such a construction will not refer to another dimensional system and will not therefore fall within our present definition. It will not stand in the way of our search for functional relations because it will arise only after relevant variables have been found and studied. Though it may be difficult to understand, it will not be easily misunderstood, and it will have none of the objectionable effects to the theories here considered. We do not seem to be ready for theory in this sense” (underlining added). I don’t agree with Skinner that we are not ready for such theory. SVB is a matter of experiencing verbal behavior, understanding it is secondary. Once we have SVB, it is effortlessly self-evident and reinforcing. We are not ready because of our NVB. SVB, by contrast, heralds a new era in scientific activity.