November 16, 2015

November 16, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Student, 

This writing is a third response to the paper “Seeing with ears: Sightless human’s perception of dog bark provides a test for structural rules in vocal communication” (2009) by C.Molnar, P.Pongracz and A. Miklosi. It is unfortunately nothing unusual that these authors still misrepresent Owren and Rendall (1997), who have written so many papers and presumably have said so much about the Affect-Inducing properties of primate vocalizations. This proves my point that the only thing academics really do is write to each other and respond to each other’s writings. Only by writing can such misrepresentations be perpetuated. 

We avoid spoken communication in order to be able to maintain our convictions. Many misunderstandings and misrepresentations are the effect of the absence of interaction. Academics merely pretend to be having a conversation. All they care about is to proclaim their theories. If they have any conversation at all, they are predetermining what they are going to say. I call such prefabricated communication Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). It is noxious as they speak with a sound, a tone, which is perceived as an aversive stimulus by the listener. In NVB the speaker induces negative affect in the listener. This self-serving bias prevents real interaction. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the speaker’s voice is perceived by the listener as an appetitive stimulus. In SVB the speaker induces positive emotions in the listener. The agreement that is achieved in SVB is qualitatively different from the so-called agreement which is coerced in NVB.

We have yet to decipher that NVB is about domination, hierarchy, intimidation, aggression, misrepresentation, fabrication and dissociation and that SVB is the spoken communication in which we are without such aversive stimulation. Yes, my dear reader, this war of words, this war of ideas, isn’t even fought in the debates, it rages on, sanitized from emotions, in peer-reviewed journals and in the texts that are written for the politicians by the speech writers. Our rates of SVB are at such an all-time low as everyone believes that the printed word is more important than the spoken word. This widespread belief is perhaps even more devastating than any religious belief. Most likely people hang on to their beliefs as they actually do want to talk.

I believe in SVB as I would like to talk. People believe in God as they too want to be able to talk. I have never thought this thought before. God, Allah or whatever we believe this so-called higher power to be, doesn’t and can’t fulfill our ‘need’ for interaction. Only other human beings can do that. This is why we are ‘identified’ with religious and political view; we want to belong and can only achieve a sense of belonging by being with people who talk like us. That sums up ideological differences. Although I believe in SVB, SVB is not a belief; NVB is a belief. 

My only interest in reading academic papers is the literature review and the discussion, the parts which at least have some semblance of a dialogue. Let me now return to the paper which I am currently reviewing. These hard-headed authors write “If humans can successfully recognize vocal signals of another species independently of the previous experiences, it would support Morton’s (1977) theory.” Why didn’t they conclude that “If humans can successfully recognize vocal signals of another species independently of the previous experiences” it would support Owren and Rendall’s (1997) theory of Affect-Induction?? They don’t have any history with any behavioral theory and their talking partners are from the Information-Processing religion. 

We all need people to talk with. That is why the abused usually keep talking with their abusers. The world of academia is very abusive and hostile and the only way to be successful is to take the abuse and to pretend as if all this NVB is okay. It only now becomes clear to me why the academic environment I was involved in didn’t and couldn’t produce nor acknowledge my distinction between SVB and NVB. This distinction could only be made in a stable and peaceful environment. Everyone who is part of this punitive and competitive process of publishing a paper, knows that they must stay with their group of believers. “However, if humans with less experience had more difficulties in this task, that would show the importance of the referential/affect-condi-tioning paradigm.” As these authors don’t understand Owren and Rendall’s “Affect-Conditioning Model” they hypothesize about the “referential/affect-conditioning paradigm.” It may not seem anything to you, dear reader, but “referential” indicates they misappropriate Owren and Rendall’s behaviorist interpretation.

This happens all the time; many behavioristic explanations have been stolen or reformulated by those who in a sense want to have it both ways. Although we live in world that is sustained by science and technology, people still hang on to their outdated beliefs. However, my distinction between SVB and NVB cannot be misused, as it exposes and weeds out these contradictions. 

Only someone who knows the difference between SVB and NVB can  analyze the false praise these authors have for Owren and Rendall. “Although it is much easier to evaluate the answers of humans than to record and decipher the reactions of animals by applying questionnaires, until now only a handful of experiments have been performed that have tested human participants in categorizing animal sounds.” Presumably they are so impressed that they mention them a second time: “It was found that humans can differentiate among individual macaques by their calls (Owren & Rendall, 2003), but participants mostly failed in categorizing cat meows by context (Nicastro & Owren, 2003). Their allegiance is not to Owren and Rendall’s functional account, but to “Morton’s (1977) Structural-Motivational Rules.”

“According to the “motivational–structural rules” hypothesis, atonal, low-pitched signals convey aggressive “meaning”, while tonal and high-pitched signals express sub-ordinance or the lack of aggressiveness.” Consequently, it is falsely “assumed also that there is no need for any prior learning in the receiver to perform the adequate response to the signal (Morton, 1977). In the discussion section of their paper the authors are a little more upfront about their disagreement with Owren and Rendall’s Affect-Conditioning Model. “According to the affect-conditioning model, the responses of receivers can be unconditioned, when the response is being produced by the signal itself, or conditioned, when response is influenced by past social interactions between the communicating partners.” They mention their model, but not their names, but when they mention “the motivational–structural rules hypothesis”, Morton’s name appears twice. The authors believe in “motivational states”, but such a mentalist construct is incompatible with “a conditioned or unconditioned response”. 

The findings of these authors are a mixture of apples and oranges, which “suggest that either (a) the ability of humans to describe dogs’ motivational state by hearing their barks is mostly not a learned, conditioned response” or “(b) this ability for recognition of barks can develop through sporadic access to nonvisual sources of information about emotional encoding of dog barking.” Words like “recognition”, “information” and “emotional encoding” have no place in a parsimonious behaviorist account.

In the last sentences of their paper, the authors mention that dog barks “are more variable in their pitch and harshness” than the barks of wolves. Wolves barks “are mainly low-pitch a-tonal sounds” and “dogs’ barking repertoire might have happened as a consequence of indirect selection through humans’ perceptual and cognitive capacities.” In SVB humans acquire more behavioral variability, but in NVB there is nothing that stimulates it.

Today also happens to be my 57^th birthday. It is early in the morning and I just got up. I dreamed about being part of a group of travelers, who arrived by bus in the middle of nowhere. Upon exiting the bus, a bunch of men came to us, who didn’t speak our language. They talked very fast and indicated they would take us into their cars and started loading up our bags. Everyone was overwhelmed and I was the only one who said no and hung on to my suitcase. They left me, but the others were goaded into their cars and driving away. It seemed clear to me that these people could not be trusted and were going to steal our belongings. 

This dream depicts how I feel about my distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In our conversations, we arrive, as a verbal community, as a culture, in the middle of nowhere, in an unknown territory. I realize that everyone is overwhelmed by coercive people. I am the only one who sees them for what they are. This is what happens again and again: we are overwhelmed by NVB. We surrender everything we have to those who take advantage of us. In SVB we are able to remain calm and notice what is happening. Thus, SVB is left untouched and those who were overwhelmed ended up being taken away by the NVB robbers. The journey of our conversation is not a new thing. I have travelled and have been in that situation before. I explored the conversation to the point where I was left by everyone and I was alone in the middle of nowhere.

I survived as SVB guides my life. Moreover, I married Bonnie, my loving wife. It was because of her I found SVB. Without SVB, we couldn’t have been married so happily and so long: thirty years. She stimulated me to have SVB and I am grateful she continues to do this even today. The dream from last night refers to events which took place before I met her. I am no longer left alone, but the experience has enriched me and I feel fortunate to have had it. The experience of aloneness is essential to increasing SVB. In NVB we are constantly overwhelmed by each other and the only way to prevent that is by moving and by staying away from aversive stimuli. The loneliness that was felt when everyone was leaving me was a blessing in disguise. It helped me to talk with myself and to listen to myself and to be by myself. In SVB the attraction to others declines as you realize most conversations end like that dream. Also, this need to go on this journey to nowhere has completely dissipated and I am not getting on such a bus-tour anymore. This is not a decision I make, but a natural outcome of my previous circumstances. It no longer overwhelms me when others are leaving; I continue with SVB.