November 11, 2016

November 11, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fifth response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” by Jaak Panksepp (2011). I love this man who dedicated his career to understanding emotions of our “fellow creatures” so as to create an evolutionary foundation for human emotions. According to Panksepp “our emotional feelings are grounded on ”instinctual behavioral” neural networks that evolved long before humans walked the face of the earth.” I deeply appreciate his willingness to talk with other researchers about his profound findings.

Why would Panksepp emphasize that “Clear dialogue in this area requires a disciplined distinction between the affective-emotional aspects of experience and the widely studied cognitive and emotional-behavioral aspects of human and animal Brain-Minds ?” He is trying to use his neuroscientific knowledge to make the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In SVB the speaker evokes and maintains positive emotions in the listener, but in NVB the speaker elicits negative emotions in the listener.

Panksepp identifies “evolved brain functions in terms of primary processes (tools for living provided by evolution), secondary-processes (the vast unconscious learning and memory mechanisms of the brain), and tertiary-processes (the higher order functions of mind permitted largely by the cortical expansions that allow many thought-related symbolic functions).” This maps onto radical behaviorism’s phylogenetic, ontogenetic and cultural causes of behavior. However, the SVB/NVB distinction brings our attention to how these processes sound to the listener when they are expressed by speakers during our conversations.

“Primal emotions are among the most important aspects of our mental lives—they bring us great joys and sorrows and intrinsically help anticipate the future—but behavioral neuroscientists have offered few hypotheses about how experiences emerge from brains, especially those of other animals.” I don’t think that behavioral neuroscientists will come up with hypotheses about how we talk about these primary processes. Panksepp is probably as good as it gets. However, it should be clear to the reader that the processes he describes have different sounds. In SVB we expresses positive, but in NVB we expresses negative emotions.

November 10, 2016

November 10, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fourth response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” by Jaak Panksepp (2011). As it is now possible to “neuro-scientifically understand primary emotional human feelings by studying animal behavior” it is apparent that our “affective feelings arise from the unconditioned emotional response systems of the brain.” Moreover, the seven emotional systems that Panksepp has identified determine how we sound while we speak.

Whether we express our positive or negative emotions, of course, sounds totally different. However, positive primary emotions such as CARE, PLAY, LUST, SEEKING and JOY and negative primary emotions such as RAGE, FEAR and PANIC produce remarkably similar sounds in animals as in humans. I propose that we call the expression of these positive emotions while we speak, Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and expression of negative emotions, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

Panksepp’s work explains “how the brain generates affective feelings – the valenced phenomenal experiences (qualia) that come in desirable (positive) and undesirable (negative) forms and varieties.” I am interested in how these desirable or undesirable experiences set the stage for two mutually exclusive, different-sounding ways of talking.

Panksepp’s aim is to “understand the affective (subjective feeling) component of emotions through close and sensitive studies of the underlying brain mechanisms in other creatures”, but my goal is to TALK about and explore the difference between SVB and NVB and to accurately express and understand our human affective experiences.  

November 9, 2016

November 9, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my third response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” by Jaak Panksepp (2011). “Since all vertebrates appear to have some capacity for primal affective feelings, the implications for animal-welfare and how we ethically treat other animals are vast.” Although Panksepp advocates for animals, he is putting the proverbial horse behind the wagon. It is out of the question that animals have affective lives. The real question he should ask is: how do we humans communicate our affective lives?

Researchers investigate the affective lives of animals hoping they will learn something about the affective lives of humans. Our language gets in the way of expressing our primary emotions. Panksepp writes about animal welfare, but, of course, human welfare is at stake. Without the accurate expression of our primary emotional processes there can be no human-welfare, and, consequently, no animal-welfare.  Furthermore, since we humans also “have some capacity for primal affective feelings, the implications” for “how we ethically treat other” humans “are vast.”

Only if we engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) will we be able to know more about our own affective lives. It is not coincidental that we are still so often involved in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which induces negative affect. Humans are still in the process of learning how to express their emotions with language. Our words get in the way of expressing our feelings. Due to our repeated failures to accurately express our feelings, we make it seem, while engaged in NVB, as if we don’t even have any emotions, as if our emotional expression is not necessary anymore or as if we don’t even need to have affective lives.  

November 8, 2016

November 8, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my second response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” by Jaak Panksepp (2011). Each time we speak we express the primary emotions Panksepp refers to in his paper; we either stimulate positive emotions or negative emotions in each other. During the former, we, that is the speaker AND the listener, engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), but during the latter, we engage in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

When we cannot acknowledge that the sound of our own voice always expresses our feelings, we can only pretend that we are not emotionally affected and this is what we repeatedly do when we engage in NVB. Panksepp explains that “Affective feelings come in several varieties, including sensory, homeostatic, and emotional (which I focus on here). Primary-process emotional feelings arise from ancient caudal and medial subcortical regions, and were among the first subjective experiences to exist on the face of the earth. Without them, higher forms of conscious “awareness” may not have emerged in primate brain evolution.” Did you get that? When we talk, we always feel something!

Unexpressed feelings result into unconscious behavior, but properly expressed emotions result into conscious behavior. However, as long as we don’t listen to how we sound while we speak, as long as we are in and affected by a threatening environment, we cannot accurately describe our feelings. Knowledge about primary-process emotional feelings will help us to finally completely express ourselves. “Because of homologous “instinctual” neural infrastructures, we can utilize animal brain research to reveal the nature of primary-process human affects.”  

November 7, 2016

November 7, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my first response to “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives?” (another paper) by Jaak Panksepp (2011). The answer is, of course, unequivocally: YES! The purpose of this writing is to demonstrate that Panksepp’s research on primary emotions maps  onto the two general ways of talking, which can be heard in humans: Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

Simply stated, in SVB we express positive emotions, but in NVB we express negative emotions. “The primal affects are intrinsic brain value systems that unconditionally and automatically inform animals how they are faring in survival.” Our voice indicates how we are faring with our survival. When we talk, our sound communicates if we are safe or not.

Panksepp’s “brain value systems” produce two different kinds of sounds which “serve an essential function in emotional learning. The positive affects index “comfort zones” that support survival, while negative affects inform animals of circumstances that may impair survival.” It can’t be stated more clearly than that. Read it three times please!

Knowing the difference between SVB and NVB will make us realize that our way of talking either supports or impairs our survival. Mankind’s survival is threatened by how we talk with each other. Our sense of community is lost as we engage mostly in NVB and less and less in SVB.

We fail to acknowledge that NVB stimulates and maintains our negative affect and that only SVB can stimulate and maintain our positive affect. As long as we don’t pay attention to the fact that we speak with a sound which threatens our survival, NVB will undermine our relationships. We need Panksepp’s brain value systems to survive.