December 28, 2014

December 28, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

During Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) the verbalizer and the mediator are not one and the same person, they cannot be. During NVB, the speakers don’t mediate themselves and are only mediated by others. Mediation of the speaker by him or herself is only possible if he or she listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. However, this is not done by the speaker, who decides to do this. Self-listening only happens, because the speaker was enough times in an environment in which he or she was able to do this, that is, if due to previous exposure the speaker’s body was changed at a micro-structural level in such a way that when he or she is again exposed to such an environment, he or she will produce such self-listening quite naturally and automatically.   

This author has been many times in environments in which self-listening and SVB was possible. He enjoyed it so much and felt so compelled to be in it again and he was so happy to avoid NVB that he kept recreating and exploring it. When he first discovered the possibility of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the interaction in which verbalizer and mediator are one and the same person as well as different persons, he noticed that the conversation was totally different from the NVB he had been used to. What intrigued him about SVB was what Fraley (2005) described as “The only thing that can happen is exactly what always does happen.” The lawfulness of SVB and NVB was immediately clear to this author, but it wasn’t until he discovered behaviorism, the natural science of human behavior, that he realized that both response classes occurred as a natural function of environmental variables and not because of what one person, whether it be a verbalizer or a mediator, does or can. 

This author refers to SVB as embodied communication, because the communicator’s restructured body shares “in the antecedent stimulus control of subsequent behaving by the same organism. “ Both SVB and NVB occur because our bodies are mostly momentarily, and seemingly, more permanently, changed by environmental variables. However, this energy transfer from one body structure to another is in a constant flux. That being said, “In the case of an ongoing train of thought, the behavior-controlling environment is inside the skin and consists of the preceding private neural behavior per se” (Fraley, 2005). Our negative or positive emotions sound differently and affect our bodies differently. NVB occurs due to how our body was affected by negative emotions, but SVB occurs due to how our body was affected by positive emotions. 

Belief in thinking, which happens subconsciously, is perpetuated by NVB. Thinking said to go on privately inside the communicator’s skin, is always conscious, because it is “nothing more than a class of behavior that, like all behavior, is the inevitable result of certain functional relations having been established.”  The fact that most people can’t explain their own or each other's behavior, is based on a belief, which is maintained by our way of talking. It is not “gainful employment” of a "nonexistent body-managing self-spirit” which maintains this belief, but unscientific communication. 

NVB is based on the assumption that we can think of more than one thing at the same time. That “thinking that occurs to a person can occur through only a single channel of stimulation” and that “a person can think of only one thing at the time” is dismissed in NVB.  “People are convinced they are consciously thinking of different things at the same time” while “in fact” they are “responding to those various events in rapid alternation.” SVB and NVB also alternate similarly. 

Negative and positive emotions and NVB and SVB, do not and cannot occur simultaneously, but self-listening and other-listening co-occur, because other-listening is embedded in or emerging from self-listening. In NVB, in which other-listening is our focus, self-listening is excluded. Only in SVB does  other-listening includes self-listening. In SVB, a child will be positively reinforced for its nonverbal expression. Even before the child becomes verbal, the child is already capable of having SVB. In other words, there is a pre-verbal or nonverbal foundation for SVB. The happy sounds of positive emotions that a child makes are usually reinforced. To the extent that this was not the case, the microstructural foundation for NVB was created in the earliest stages of the child’s development.  

What we are capable of ‘learning’ during our lifetime is governed by our “neural responses” that in turn “depend heavily on our own respective conditioning histories” (Fraley, 2005). Thus, our knowledge is how our body responds privately. In effect, we “do not acquire knowledge but instead behave it for ourselves.” How we respond to certain stimuli is measured mainly by our verbal responses. This writer, however, wants to enhance learning by bringing attention to how we respond non-verbally. It is easier to follow a particular verbal train of thought when we are non-verbally attuned. Derailment of human relationship is due to our over-emphasis on verbal responding, due to which we overlook the importance of nonverbal responding. In SVB our attention for how we sound, for the nonverbal, makes what we say easier to be understood. Moreover, SVB enhances our well-being regardless of what we are talking about. Anxiety and stress involved in the belief that we can think of many things simultaneously, is totally absent in SVB, which heralds a new way of learning.  SVB is based on positive feedback from the environment within and without our skin.