October 4, 2015

October 4, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my eight response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). The authors remind the reader that “No matter what population of neural activity produces the behavioral response, the reinforcer strengthens the environmental control of that response and, in so doing, changes the synaptic efficacies that mediate it. As Skinner noted, neuroscience fills in the ‘‘gaps’’ (Skinner, 1974, p. 237) between the environment and behavior (Mc-Ilvane & Dube).” The reinforcer that strengthens the environmental control of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is the listener. The SVB speaker depends for reinforcement on the SVB listener, who becomes a SVB speaker. The SVB speaker will only be reinforced for his or her SVB speech if the SVB listener responds with SVB. The NVB listener cannot and does not reinforce the SVB speaker.

There is a great difference between the reinforcement that is received by the SVB speaker from the SVB listener who remains a SVB listener or from the SVB listener, who becomes a SVB speaker. Both reinforce the SVB speaker, but the latter reinforces the SVB speaker more than the former as only the latter talks with the SVB speaker. It is great, if one speaks Russian, to be understood by someone who understands it, but even greater if one can have an actual conversation with that person.

This signifies the developmental difference between the beginner and the more advanced speaker. A child learns how to speak by being reinforced for tacting, but it gains more environmental control as it begins to mand. Conversely, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) speakers can only be reinforced by NVB listeners, who sometimes become a NVB speaker. The great difference between SVB and NVB is the SVB listener is stimulated by the SVB speaker to become a SVB speaker, but the NVB speaker often doesn’t even allow the NVB listener to be a NVB speaker.  

The NVB speaker doesn’t like competition from another NVB speaker, but he or she always stimulates it. The NVB speaker always elicits some kind of counter-control in the listener who is not allowed to become a speaker. The NVB speaker is reinforced for his or her coercive speech by the obedient NVB listener, whose covert negative self-talk signifies the aforementioned counter-control. When oppressed, vengeful NVB listeners eventually become NVB speakers themselves, they will have outpaced the oppressiveness and insidiousness of those speakers who conditioned them. Intergenerational cycles of violence have not only been perpetuated in this way, but have also worsened. All our mental health problems are stimulated and reinforced by coercive NVB speech.  

Instead of talking about “synaptic efficacies” and presumed ‘chemical imbalances’, we should be talking about the imbalance between the speaker and the listener, which gives rise to NVB. No matter how far it advances, neuroscience will never be able to fill that gap. In SVB, such imbalance doesn’t even arise. In SVB, something can stabilize, which couldn’t stabilize in NVB. Many people, who have been raised in environments with high rates of SVB, go through life suffering without understanding how this suffering is maintained. If one grew up with high rates of SVB, one is bound to suffer more than if one grew up with high rates of NVB. NVB makes people insensitive and makes them abuse others. NVB is a form of verbal abuse. What has been going on historically in the name of human interaction was often verbal abuse. Skinner is right on the mark: the real gap is “between the environment and behavior”, that is, in NVB, between the speaker and the listener.

I cut and paste many parts of this paper to give myself the opportunity to respond as closely as possible. “The observability of a response is not determined by its intensity or magnitude, but by the characteristics or tools of the observer.” The new tool of the observer is the distinction between SVB and NVB. Yesterday, during my evening class, I again let 38 students listen to sound samples of SVB and NVB in Dutch, French and German. Based on my previous English explanation of the SVB/NVB distinction, after 9 weeks, that is, 9 trials of teaching, the entire class was able to accurately discriminate between SVB and NVB in three unknown languages. If a group of college students can be conditioned by a SVB speaker like me, there is no reason why behaviorists can’t be made aware of this important distinction, which will allow them to separate the wheat from the chaff.

A lot of conversation is not conversation, but NVB. “Many venerable dependent variables . ., such as changes in skin conductivity, blood pressure, heart rate, etc., are measurable only through instrumental amplification. . We must avoid the temptation to think of covert behavior as a kind of behavior, with properties essentially different from overt behavior. Rather, all behavior lies on a continuum of observability. . ” However, unless we say out loud what we are thinking and feeling, that is, unless private speech is included into public speech, what we covertly think to ourselves is not and cannot be listened to by the speaker-as-own-listener. We can only listen to ourselves while we speak. Yet, we can only listen to ourselves while we speak during SVB.

In NVB speakers are forcing listeners to listen to them, but they are not listening to themselves. Moreover, in NVB speakers aversively affect the listener whose covert speech is pushed out of the public speech. It should be clear to the reader that the SVB listener who is listening to the NVB speaker is experiencing many problems understanding this speaker as he or she is negatively affected by how he or she talks. NVB public speech will always result into NVB private speech and SVB public speech will always result into SVB private speech. As long as our private speech remains unexpressed, it seemingly has a different property as our overt public speech. In other words, at long last “the continuum of observability” will become ‘visible’ due to the SVB/NVB distinction. It was out of sight, that is, out of our hearing range, due to NVB and it comes into ‘auditory view’ with SVB. My work has demonstrated over the years, that the NVB speaker conditions the listener to tune-out the sounds which pertain to relaxation, well-being and positive emotions.

October 3, 2015

October 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This writing is my seventh response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). The following statement characterizes the author’s bias toward visual stimuli. “At the behavioral level, the neural activity underlying

the response is invisible to the reinforcing environment.” Like other behaviorists, they have been ‘looking’ for variables in the environment. However, observable variables don’t stimulate them to ‘look’ for the auditory variables that might be involved. When it comes to auditory  variables there is nothing to ‘look’ for. They are easier to detect when one closes one’s eyes. While temporarily depriving oneself from visual stimuli, one is bound to become more alert to auditory stimuli. 

There is nothing new about this ancient practice, which ‘sheds light’ onto private-speech-receded public speech, that is, to what one is saying to one self. Many so-called meditators have attempted in vain to ‘observe’ what they were thinking or feeling, but for them too, it was  visual bias which prevented them from listening to and tracing back the  environmental variables that are in the maintenance of these covert phenomena. Before this writer became a behaviorist, he was intensely involved in such ‘meditative’ activities. He became frustrated with his attempts to achieve silence by trying to ‘observe’ what he at that time still believed to be his ‘mind.’ Because of growing up in a family with six children in which there was a lot of talking and screaming and because he had been studying classical music for many years as a tenor-singer, he had been strongly attracted to singing and speaking. The latter had often gotten him in a lot of trouble.

Not many meditators are interested in talking about meditation. The so-called meditation always seemed to be over as soon as the talking began again. I could not keep my mouth shut because I was convinced it should be possible to talk meditatively. Since no one was interested in exploring this possibility with me, I began to talk out loud by myself. As I felt rejected and hurt I discovered SVB by listening to my sound while I speak. Most behaviorists, like these superstitious meditators, believe that they have found the Holy Grail: observable environmental stimuli which cause the response. Similarly to these spiritualists, most behaviorists (even Skinner himself) are not exploring auditory stimuli which are causing their own verbal behavior as they were conditioned to pay attention to visual stimuli. Consequently, in day-to-day speech, they are more focused on what they say then on how they are saying it. 

To pay close attention to how we sound while we speak requires a focus on our own voice. This focus can only be made if what we are saying is no longer ‘dominating’ how we are saying it. The situation in which we are stimulated to listen to ourselves while we speak has to be one in which we don’t have to be overly careful about what we are saying. Stated differently, only when we are feeling safe, accepted, acknowledged, supported and positively reinforced, only in the absence of aversive stimulation, will we be speakers who are not coercing, exploiting, manipulating, draining, distracting and dysregulating the listener. What we are saying also becomes coherent in SVB; how we are saying it makes this happen. Another way of putting this is in SVB nonverbal and verbal expressions are aligned as the speaker experiences him or herself as the listener. The speaker’s nonverbal auditory stimuli, his or her voice, control his or her verbal behavior. 

Although, like neural stimuli, auditory stimuli are invisible, they can be listened to. Moreover, listening to auditory stimuli is not as complicated as observing neural stimuli; it doesn’t involve any other measurement instruments than our ears. As a matter of fact, listening to ourselves is the easiest thing to do. It is effortless and without any tension. We have all done it if circumstances permitted it and we are all familiar with it. At the level of our vocal verbal behavior we have all spoken at one time with a voice which was reinforcing to us. 

The big deal about ‘finding our own voice’ is in direct proportion to the extent that we were prevented that from having it. Everything that stressed, threatened, forced, angered and frustrated us has prevented us from producing what we would happily call ‘our true sound’. In other words, our ‘real voice’ always expresses our relaxation and well-being. When we talk with that voice in SVB we are conscious that we are using that voice.

When we have NVB, on the other hand, we don’t know that our voice is an aversive stimulus that induces negative affect in the listener, who is also the speaker him or herself. However, the listener knows and if the speaker becomes the listener of his or her own voice while he or she speaks, he or she will know this too and experience SVB. 

Indeed, when NVB stops, SVB begins and when SVB stops NVB begins. These two ways of talking are mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed to each other. In SVB the speaker is conscious of his or her speech as the  focus on his or her sound, which is produced and listened to here/now, will make and keep the speaker conscious. In NVB, however, the speaker is mechanical and unconscious as he or she doesn’t listen to his or her sound while he or she speaks. The NVB speaker only becomes conscious of him or herself again during SVB, when he or she finds that he or she was ‘on automatic pilot’ and not listening to him or herself.    

October 2, 2015

October 2, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my sixth response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). I agree with the authors who state “In order for the effects of selection by reinforcement to be understood, the ‘‘natural lines of fracture’’ must be honored at all levels of organization (Churchland & Sejnowski, 1992)—behavioral, neural, and cellular (Field; Galbicka; Hutchison; see Palmer, Donahoe, & Crowley, 1985). However, when it comes to the “natural lines of fracture” delineating nonverbal aspects of how we speak, understanding is not enough. Experience, of course, is an aspect of understanding, but when we are involved with reading and writing that experience is absent. Even when we are involved in conversation that experience of talking is not getting much attention.

When the speaker doesn’t pay attention to how he or she speaks, that is, when the speaker doesn’t listen to him or herself while he or she speaks, he or she produces Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The speaker doesn’t and can’t embody what he or she says in NVB as there is no alignment between his or her verbal and nonverbal expression. In NVB all the attention of the listener is forced to go to what the speaker is saying. In other words, the verbal presumably is more important than the nonverbal in NVB. One aspect of this verbal bias is that printed language (in scientific papers, but also in books, newspapers, websites, magazines and text messages) supposedly is more important than spoken language. However, nonverbal signals of the speaker, that is, his or her sound, affects the listener in profound ways, which we have yet to fully investigate and acknowledge. This cannot be accomplished by writing or reading and has to be done while we are speaking.

Only while we talk can we delineate the difference between NVB and Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and experience the sound of our own voice. I did an experiment in my classroom. I had already explained to my students the difference between SVB and NVB and I let them listen to an audio sound sample of SVB and NVB in my Dutch native language. Since they didn’t understand my Dutch, they could only identify whether it was SVB or NVB by the sound of my voice. The entire class recognized SVB as SVB and NVB as NVB. In my next experiment I will make sound samples of SVB and NVB and use different speakers than myself and different languages. I predict they will just as readily identify the SVB and NVB of the unfamiliar speakers in unfamiliar languages.

It is important to analyze how we sound while we talk as in addition to what the speaker says verbally, his or her voice induces nonverbally negative or positive affect in the listener. “What is considered a unitary response at the behavioral level (e.g., lever pressing) is an expression of the concerted firing of a large population of cortical and motor neurons at the neural level (e.g., Georgopoulos, 1990, in press). It is not that one level of analysis is ‘‘right’’ and the other ‘‘wrong,’’ but that one or the other level is more or less appropriate for the phenomenon under study.” I want the phenomenon under study to be how we interact.

Only if we are stimulated to activate the speaker-as-own-listener, only if the speaker begins to listen to him or herself while he or she speaks, will the speaker begin to notice the appropriateness and the necessity of this level of analysis.  Only if the speaker receives the feedback from the listener about how he or she is impacting the listener, will the speaker be able to achieve and maintain SVB. During NVB, by contrast, the speaker is not receiving any feedback from the listener. Besides, the listener who doesn’t object to the NVB speaker is as much conditioned by NVB as the NVB speaker him or herself and is unable to give him or her any feedback. The mechanical, unconscious and aversive spoken communication, which is NVB, is maintained by the speaker and by the listener. We haven’t explored that our environment is causing our vocal verbal behavior and think of speakers as being separate from listeners.

This morning I recorded more SVB and NVB samples from the internet. I had already made an audio sample of my own voice and had tested it in class.  Today I also made audio recordings of SVB and NVB in French and in German. My students listened to the six audio samples in a language they didn’t know: in Dutch, French and German. I picked these samples and labeled them as SVB or NVB. My students already knew about the difference between SVB and NVB as I had explained it to them. Today is the fifth week of this semester, so we have met eight times. In other words, eight trials were sufficient to condition them to be able to discriminate between SVB and NVB.  The Dutch sample of NVB came first and then came the Dutch sample of SVB. This was followed by a French sample of SVB and then a French sample of NVB. Lastly, the students listened to a German audio version of NVB and then to a SVB sample. As I predicted, there was unanimous agreement about SVB and NVB in each language. Students who didn’t know Dutch, French or German were able to differentiate between SVB and NVB based on what I had taught them in the eight trials or classes we have met. Hundred percent interrater reliability demonstrates the validity of these universal categories. I am reminding the reader that the authors insist that “the ‘‘natural lines of fracture’’ must be honored at all levels of organization” and that SVB and NVB are therefore response classes which are of utmost importance. Besides the Caucasian American students, there are also Latino students from Mexico, Bolivia and Chile, as well as students from Russia, Hungary, Vietnam, Laos, China and Japan in my class. In other words, I have a diverse population in my class who in spite of their cultural differences was able to discriminate between SVB and NVB. The unanimous nonverbal agreement was really powerful. Some students commented that nonverbal agreement is the necessary condition for verbal agreement. Everyone recognized the difference in how people sound when they are talking AT or WITH each other and everyone agreed that we need to listen to how we sound while we speak if we want to be able to talk WITH each other.

October 1, 2015

October 1, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This writing is my fifth response to “The Unit of Selection: What Do Reinforcers Reinforce?” by J.W. Donahoe, D.C. Palmer and J.E. Burgos (1997). The authors state that “‘‘Fear’’ is not reduced in general, but with respect to certain stimuli. However, in neither case are we arguing that knowledge of the environment is sufficient for understanding the behavior of interest. The organism, through the effects of its selection history on its nervous system, makes a necessary contribution to the environment–behavior relation.” These effects of the organism’s selection history are of utmost importance for understanding Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

We all learn how to speak, read and write, as we grow up within a verbal community that conditions certain rates of SVB and NVB. We almost seem to forget that learning how to listen is equally dependent on the environment in which we grow up as learning how to speak. Moreover, without learning how to listen, there are quite predictably going to be enormous problems down the line with speaking, reading and writing. This is exactly why we haven’t been able to acknowledge the crucial distinction between SVB and NVB. In essence, our ignorance about the SVB/NVB distinction is because we are such bad listeners.

My repeated observation is that all of those who say that others are not listening to them are not listening to themselves. Although it may be true that others aren’t listening to them and are trying to dominate, oppress and exploit them with their way of talking, those who object against this are not listening themselves either. To state it differently, neither the oppressor nor the oppressed listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. Everyone wants the other person to listen to him or to her. In other words, NVB is characterized by other-listening, while SVB is characterized by the speaker-as-own-listener, by self-listening.

In NVB other-listening excludes self-listening, but in SVB self-listening includes other-listening. These totally different ways of listening cause most of our speaking, reading and writing to be of a NVB quality. In NVB speaking we want others to listen to us, but we are not listening to ourselves. In NVB writing, we want others to read us, but we don’t and we can’t read ourselves, as we don’t really write to ourselves in the first place. We will only learn from our own writing to the extent that we are listening to ourselves. The fact that only some people do most of the talking and that others are made to listen doesn’t mean that they are listening or that they are better listeners as they remain quiet. It has been my repeated finding that those who are generally more inclined to listen have more problems listening to themselves than those who do most of the talking. It makes sense if one considers the simple fact that because of their lack of talking there is nothing to listen to. We can only listen to ourselves while we speak and we must speak in order to be able to listen to ourselves. This is a very different understanding of listening than the false belief that we will only listen by not speaking.

The speaker capable of producing high rates of SVB has a very different behavioral history than the speaker who produces high rates of NVB. Also, the listener who is troubled by NVB has a very different behavioral history than the listener who is not troubled by NVB. To the extent he or she is troubled by NVB, he or she has had more SVB in his or her behavioral history than the listener who is not troubled by NVB. “The organism, through the effects of its selection history on its nervous system, makes a necessary contribution to the environment–behavior relation.” Thus, neither the NVB speaker nor the NVB listener is very troubled by the SVB speaker. The NVB speaker likes to have the SVB speaker around as he or she will not get in his or her way like a NVB speaker would. As long as people don’t recognize the SVB/NVB distinction, SVB speakers will lose their SVB in their attempts to interact with NVB speakers. SVB speakers can only maintain their SVB with SVB speakers and SVB listeners. Yet, it is possible that SVB speakers can maintain their SVB even with NVB listeners.

The SVB speaker is able to maintain his or her SVB with NVB listeners, as he or she positively affects the way in which the NVB listener listens. However, the NVB listener seldom listens long enough to the SVB speaker to become him or herself a SVB speaker. That is, he or she became a NVB speaker in the first place as he or she didn’t hear  enough SVB speech in his or her behavioral history to become a SVB speaker. If, however, the NVB speaker is exposed long enough to the SVB speaker, he or she will eventually become a SVB speaker as well. As stated, this conditioning process can only occur if listening is more addressed than speaking. The NVB speaker is so fixated on what he or she is saying that he or she ignores how he or she sounds while talking.

Any speaker can only become a SVB speaker if he or she listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. This means that the rate of listening behavior in the NVB speaker must be increased while simultaneously the rate of speaking behavior must be decreased. The person who is troubled by the NVB speaker has a SVB listening behavioral history, but not a SVB speaking history. Such a listening-inclined person must speak to be able to listen to him or herself while he or she speaks. However, increase in speaking behavior while simultaneously listening doesn’t occur near a NVB speaker. The person with SVB listening history must, through punishment, ‘learn’ to avoid the NVB speaker and discriminate the SVB speaker with whom he or she can learn to become a SVB speaker. It is my observation that in spite of repeated punishment, the SVB listener is still likely to continue to want to have SVB with the NVB speaker. The conditioning history which led to uneven rates of speaking and listening behavior is very common and consequently are we mostly engaged in NVB. In SVB speaking and listening behavior happen at the exact same rate. The equalization of listening and speaking behavior can be accomplished only when the speaker listens to him or herself while he speaks. We can only accurately perceive a speaker as having SVB or NVB when our history permits us to do so. This history is an accumulative process of the repeated interaction with SVB speakers.