October 19, 2014

Sunday November 30, 2014, from 1:00pm to 5:00pm

Free Seminar:

Welcome To Sound Verbal Behavior

With Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Chico Branch of the Butte County Library,

1108 Sherman Avenue, Chico CA 95926

According to the natural science of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), you can say for yourself if it works or not. Once you begin to listen to your own voice while you speak, one of two things is predicted to happen: you like what you hear or you don’t like it. If you like your own sound, you are producing SVB, but, if you don’t like what you hear, you produce Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). As long as you don’t feel good about your own sound while you speak, you produce a sound which elicits a stressed, anxious, angered, frustrated, distracted or threatened response in others. Elicitation refers to respondent behavior, which is innate. The fight, flight or freeze responses, which are characteristic for NVB, are caused by the sound of our voice, which functions as an aversive stimulus. As reflexive behaviors predate the arrival of language, which is a recent event in our evolutionary history, when these autonomic responses release cascades of neurotransmitters, they make social engagement impossible. 

 

It goes without saying or, rather, it will be, based on experimental evidence, apparent to most of us, that sound has always been the mechanism by means of which we communicate our relative sense of safety and well-being with one another. By focusing on how we sound, we can effortlessly improve our spoken communication. Our sound is produced and listened to in the here and now. In SVB, we become conscious or meditative communicators. However, the opposite is equally true: due to NVB we have remained unconscious mechanical communicators. SVB is other-evident as well as self-evident, as we experience what is outside and inside of our skin as one environment. During SVB there is alignment of verbal and nonverbal expression and what we say is made clear and supported by how we say it. SVB is an operant behavior, which can only be acquired due to the safety, care and comfort provided by our environment. Even if we weren’t conditioned to have high rates of SVB, we can still reliably increase our rates of SVB and simultaneously decrease our rates NVB responding. The contingencies of reinforcement for SVB and NVB are mutually exclusive. 

 

Another way of describing NVB and SVB is that in the former we talk at each other, but in the latter we begin to talk with each other. Surely, NVB is uni-directional and SVB is bi-directional; in SVB we take turns being a speaker and a listener, but in NVB we don’t take turns, because we can’t. Thus, SVB is a listener’s or mediator’s perspective of the speaker or the verbalizer. In NVB, mediators fixate on the verbalizer and other-listening excludes self-listening. Only in SVB do we really listen to each other because we listen to ourselves. Ironically, in NVB we coerce others to listen to us, but we don’t listen to ourselves. Bring friends and family, come in time and stay for the whole duration of the seminar so that you can reap the maximum benefits from this life-and-relationship altering, verifiable scientific process. 

Kind greetings,

Maximus