May 6, 2014

May 6, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader,

If prediction and control is what behaviorists aim to achieve, they must acknowledge the natural order of phenomena that are occurring during our spoken communication. Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) are easily identifiable categories of verbal behavior, which amazingly have not yet been scientifically recognized for how they organize all human interaction. 

The fact that scientific validation continuous to be dependent on written descriptions which cannot explain the phenomena of spoken communication, has prevented behaviorists and non-behaviorists alike from exploring our spoken communication while it is happening. The distinction between SVB and NVB only makes sense during our spoken communication, but gets lost in translation when it is written.

This doesn’t mean that SVB and NVB don’t exist, nor that these categories wouldn’t be useful in predicting and controlling our verbal behavior. This writer, who conducted hundreds of seminars on this topic, has reliably and repeatedly re-created the situation in which participants from every culture, form all walks of life and from every level of intelligence, have validated this distinction.

It is only during our spoken communication that we can experience the SVB/NVB distinction. When we experience it, we sense that we do and there is really nothing much to think about. It is like being in a hot or cold room. There is no doubt for anyone which room is hot and which one is cold. Similarly, there is no doubt in anyone, which is SVB and which is NVB, because we all experience the difference. 

We don’t need to understand the distinction between SVB and NVB. Our tendency to want to understand it prevents us from experiencing it. Reading about SVB and NVB gives the reader the false impression that there is something to be understood. This writer insists that there is nothing to be understood about SVB. Understanding is a function of our experience in the communication process in which we are able to make this distinction. Thus, experience of SVB comes first and the understanding of SVB is an outcome of our experience. 

With our emphasis on understanding we throw out the child with the bathwater over and over again. We are so fixated on words that we fail to recognize that verbal behavior emerges from and always remains embedded in its nonverbal origins. Behaviorists, who should be familiar with animal research, ought to know that the principles of behavioral control apply to all levels of behavioral complexity. Thus, the lawfulness of behavior should be as apparent in a rat, who presses a lever, as a human being, who practices meditation. The let-go of what some have called the chattering monkey-mind is needed to experience nonverbal well-being. To be without words, is to be quiet and enhances our ability to be with words. What has been called inner peace or meditation is positive self-talk, which is possible as there is no need to be on guard about NVB public speech. 

Increased focus on how verbal behavior emerges from our nonverbal, embodied, proprioceptive experience, within our own skin, indicates the great difference between SVB and NVB. Certain things can only be understood if certain experiences facilitate this learning. In NVB, in which communicators disconnect from their own and each other’s experiences, there is no possibility to gain understanding. What a person experiences privately, covertly or subjectively, is explained by the same lawfulness of behavior as what a person experiences publicly, overtly and objectively.